PROJETO ALDO PARISOT
In October 2022, Fabio Presgrave, a Brazilian musician and music pedagogue, invited me to participate in a social project, Aldo Parisot, that is aimed at groups of girls aged 10-15 in Caico and Jucurutu. I met with Fabio in Natal, in the north-east of Brazil, before traveling to Caico and Jucurutu, to discuss details about the project and my role in it.
During the pandemic, in 2020-2022, Fabio had started to play cello at hospitals in Brazil. One time when he was playing in a hospital, a patient, a young girl, had started to sing with him. This incident sparked the thought of helping children, and especially young girls to get out of poverty-cycles and he decided to start this project that is aimed for 10-15 years old girls in the interior cities of Brazil. Two string-orchestras where local girls could learn to play where put up, one in Caico and another one in Jucurutu, in Rio de Grande Norte. By the time I got to Brazil, the girls had been playing for two months.
PLANNING THE WORKSHOPS
I made a plan for the sessions including warm-ups, with the intention of getting to know each other, creating a safe and creative atmosphere within the group and to be as an introduction to the topic. According to Huhtinen-Hildén and Pitt (2018), it requires feelings of safety and togetherness to be able to create and make music in a group (2019, pp. 75, 81) and by facilitating interaction between the participants a sense of togetherness can be strengthened. When being creative we are making ourselves vulnerable by sharing something of ourselves, and it is important for the pedagogue to allow the participants to choose the level of sharing (Huhtinen-Hildén and Pitt, 2018, pp. 75-76).
Based on these thoughts I chose several warm-up practices based on body percussion and improvisation, which I would choose from depending on how much time I had.
WARM-UPS:
The ping-pong-game, names with movement, rhythm-machine, conductor-game and creating soundscapes.
COMING UP WITH AN IDEA
The project was planned to have a concert four days after our meeting, and Fabio asked me if I wanted to travel to Caico the next day to teach the group something in Finnish, that could be performed in the concert. I was excited to see what I could come up with, within the frame of my research method.
My first idea was to write a song together with the students, but because of the time limit of only a few lessons before the performance, I decided to write a song in advance that would include some improvisation for the students to engage with. I sat down with my guitar in my apartment balcony that same evening and wrote a song for the project.
The stories Fabio had told me were the starting point for writing the lyrics of the song. I was thinking about how this project was intended to stop the poverty-cycles and to open new opportunities to the students participating. The song turned out to be a poetic text about the wind to describe dreaming and daring to dream. The text can also be seen as a way to artistically portray the ideas of socio-cultural animation and Educación popular (Kinnunen, Penttilä, Rantala, Salonen & Tervo 2003, pp. 15-18).
I wanted the lyrics to be as simple as possible, so I used a lot of repeating sounds and words that sound similar with each other (Kuulen - Tuulen- uuden). Knowing that the students had only played for two months, I thought it would be good if we played something on the open strings of the violins, violas and cellos and with that thought I created an easy chord progression that would be easily played on the open strings. I added a part with improvising a wind soundscape to the song and decided that I would start working with this material together with the students and see where it goes from there. Following the ideas of Lee Higgins (2008, pp. 328) I wanted to keep the structure of my plan of the workshop as open as possible within the given time limit, to be able to create a space of exploration and experimentation. Higgins (2008, pp. 329) encourages workshop facilitators to aim for an unpredictable creative music-making experience for the group, in other words to ’strive for the impossible’. An open workshop structure allows openness, freedom, and tolerance to flow (Higgins, 2008, pp. 330), which I believe helps to create a safe and equal space in the workshop.
MATERIAL FOR THE WORKSHOP (Lyrics & chords)
C (4th open string for everyone)
Kuulen kuulen tuulen, kuulen uuden mahdollisuuden
G (3rd open string for everyone)
Minne lie
D (2nd open string for everyone)
Meidät vie ?
C (4th open string for everyone)
Lentoon
D/C ((4th open string for cellos and violas, 2nd string for violins)
Hentoon
