Melody

Do Re Mi Fa So

Sa Re Ga Ma Pa

Major, minor, dorian, blues, minor blues, pentatonic…..

I care! I don’t care! I know! I don’t know! I know, but how do I apply this to vocal improvisation?

The more melodic literacy we have, the more clear musical variety we can have in our improvising together and it really deepens and expands the sonic landscapes that we can co-create.

The workshop will start basic on the first morning and get more and more advanced as the weekend progresses.

If you’re melodically skilled, I hope the first parts will be useful to you in terms of how to work with folks with less skill, either as a teacher or a collaborator - fun approaches to build melodic musical literacy through vocal improvisation. 

If you’re less skilled with melody, the first parts will be teaching for you, and then if the content starts to go over your head, I will give you some really fun singing forms to do together. You could also stay in the room and pick up what you can, and may it feed your musical journey for the long term.

My aims in this workshop are:

a) To help you all become more skilled with your use of melody with vocal improvisation and 

b) to share forms that you can bring into your collaborations, teaching, and practice in the medium to long term, so that the vocal improvisation community is able to meet folks where we are with melody, and do creatively juicy forms that also build melodic skill and expand the musical sonic pallette in the collaborative realm.

We’ll explore degrees of the scale, intervals, and 3-4 scales over the course of the weekend, technically and creatively, using a variety of methods for teaching, practice, and collaborative vocal improvisation forms that help to build melodic skill.

Limited to 16 places.

Details

Cost

Tier 1 $350

Tier 2 $250

Tier 3 $150

Please select your tier in integrity, you will not be assessed.

How to Pay

Please pay directly, also please register using the button below.

Venmo @Briony-Greenhill

Paypal brionygmusic@gmail.com

Payment plans are fine. Email info@brionygreenhill.com and propose something that works for you.

Taking 2 workshops? Take off 10%. Taking 3? Take 15% off. Taking all of them? Take 20% off!

About Briony Greenhill

Briony is a highly experienced, internationally recognised teacher of collaborative vocal improvisation, CVI. Since 2018 she taught the class Wild Voice, Solid Roots, which balanced vocal improvisation training with training in vocal musicianship / applied music theory / chops for singers. She’s taken 15-30 students a year through that program from beginner to advanced levels.

Briony now tends The Singing Circle online membership program, and Your Song library of online courses, including Chops for Singers which covers melody, harmony and rhythm for singers from beginner to advanced levels.

Briony studied music with Atulkumar Upadhye in India, David Eskenazy in France, Rhiannon and Bobby McFerrin in the US, and also several piano teachers including Frank Martin, Julie Wolf, Huw Warren and Michiel de Koning. She was recently awarded funding from Arts Council England to study non-diatonic harmony for a year, producing learning she’s applied to composition and string/ horn arrangements for her next album, Symbiocene Mama (currently recording).

Briony has released 4 entirely improvised albums, and her debut studio album, Crossing the Ocean, received good reviews from The Guardian, Mojo, and BBC Radio 3 and 4. 

Between polycrisis, omnicide, motherhood, the hopeful rise of the Green Party in the UK and Briony’s degree in political science and background in change work, Briony’s life is being drawn more and more into politics and she’s somewhat in handover mode with her teaching. 

She cares deeply about access to this embodied, ear-based approach to learning music, particularly drawing from improvisational and non Western music cultures, as extremely accessible and empowering for anyone who is musical yet alienated by the dots, as Briony was.  So this is a path of studying music with the voice, ear and body, to use as a vocal co-creative human.

Briony’s teaching is trauma informed, but to be clear, this will not be such a space of self expression and check ins and so on, as a space of regulated, calm, creative music school. Here we go :)