Jennie Dorris - Blog

Musical Storytelling Composition Workshop: How to Turn an Audience into Composers

11/15/2018

How do you get from a blank page to this composition with 100 people collaborating?

During our August concert set of Shelter Music Boston, one of the guests at a homeless shelter left a note that read: “Please if possible, compose about Broken Pieces.” Following the note was a poem that she had written:

“Broken Pieces”
We were not broken from the start
But suddenly things fell apart
Bits and pieces scattered here and there
Shattered lives.

The musical ideas and words of the homeless individuals served monthly by Shelter Music Boston had inspired all of the pieces we were performing for her, and we loved that she wanted her poem to be our next inspiration. We used a process called Musical Storytelling to compose with previous shelter audiences, and we knew that we wanted to share this process with an upcoming audience who would attend a Shelter Music Boston benefit concert. But why just describe it, when the audience could actually experience it? We brainstormed how we could have our benefit audience consider this poem and create the music for it.

We set up a structure to set each line of the poem to music, with all of the musical decisions to be made by the audience and performed by a trio of myself on marimba, Julie Leven on violin, and RaShaun Campbell, baritone voice.

But then the benefit audience arrived. We were used to doing Musical Storytelling with small groups. Now we had close to 100 people. And as soon as we started to ask questions about how to set the first line to music, EVERYONE had opinions. Not only did the audience learn to express their own ideas, they experienced exactly what had happened at the shelters -- they started working together as a group to shape the composition with common goals.

Watch this short video to see an abridged version of how the final two lines of the poem came to life from the audience's ideas:

And listen to the final, full performance of their composition, Broken Pieces!

CMU Prep: Teens creating collaborative compositions about their community

11/10/2018

Each semester I work with fantastic young musicians at Carnegie Mellon University's Preparatory School to create their own original compositions that are inspired by people, places, and art in their community. They've worked with poets, painters, photographers, evolutionary biologists, and historical foundations over the past four semesters.

Below, check out a little documentary that the Hillman Photography Initiative made about their collaboration with the students of CMU Prep:

Completing the Project: Bringing Collaborative Compositions back to Boston’s Homeless Shelters

8/28/2018

From left -- violist Rebecca Strauss, composer Danielle Williams, violinist Julie Leven, and myself. We presented each shelter with a score of their composition.

Last year I wrote about the composition workshops that Shelter Music Boston brought into homeless shelters. Each shelter created a wealth of musical ideas, and we gathered those ideas -- as well as beautiful poems and comments from the guests -- and sent them to composers to commission chamber works.

This year we returned to the shelters to perform these works, now grouped into a suite called “Water For My Soul.”

When I started preparing the music, I immediately started smiling. Danielle Williams composed “Shells From the Sea” for baritone voice, viola, marimba, and cello. The first melody, sung stunningly by baritone RaShaun Campbell, was the melody the women at the Dimock Center had composed with violist Rebecca Strauss and me last June. More importantly, I remembered they loved their melody so much they all left singing it together.

Later in her piece, Danielle wrote a little fugue between myself, the viola, and the cello (played beautifully by Javier Caballero). In that fugue was a melody we had begun writing with a shelter in Lowell and had presented down to the Pine Street Women’s Inn to complete. When we played the first part of the melody, a woman at Pine Street immediately started singing a second part to the melody, essentially finishing its sentence. To hear that melody finalized as a fugue was the perfect treatment to a melodic line composed across the city by different shelter guests!

Telling Stories at DSA (and that little ole radio show from all those years ago)

10/29/2017

Telling Stories is a unique interdisciplinary program that is designed to inspire students to both collaborate across disciplines and create original work. The process helps students learn to speak each others’ languages, inspires faculty members to work together in new ways, and gives non-performing artists a chance to take the stage with their performing colleagues. I’ve been producing an annual show at the Denver School of the Arts since 2008, and I often get this question: “So, how do you get students in writing, music, visual arts, and tech to all work together? And what does that even look like?”

Well, I’m glad you asked! Check out the slide show below from this year's show, Weird Science:

My Residency at The Neighborhood Academy -- Poetry and Original Music

10/29/2017

For three years I was in residence at The Neighborhood Academy leading Spoken Word, where students write original poems and then create musical compositions to accompany them. A little bit for folks who don't know about this awesome school: The Neighborhood Academy seeks to break the cycle of generational poverty by preparing low-income youth for college. 75% of students have a household income of $25,000 or less. Students go to school for a 12-hour day and 100% of students go on to college. Often students have never experienced a cultural activity before going to this school.

This year we have been lucky to work with Youth Express, who have come out to record the students, and Saturday Light Brigade, who had the students on a live radio taping. All of the students' work is housed hereand here on Soundcloud.

Composing in Boston's Homeless Shelters

8/6/2017

For a week in June, I gave hour-long concerts to which I brought no prepared music. And these were less-than-typical concert venues -- every night I was in a different homeless shelter in and outside of Boston. I had my marimba, a load of different-sounding mallets, and an oversized sketch pad propped up on an easel. I wasn’t alone -- two incredibly talented string players joined; a violinist for the first five concerts, and a violist for the sixth. With just our instruments, our huge notepad, and our imaginations, we had a goal: Could we create an experience for people who were homeless to compose music with us?

This project was the brainchild of Shelter Music Boston, who for the past seven years has offered monthly classical concerts to homeless shelters. (I've joined them as a musician for the past five years.) Founder and artistic director Julie Leven (pictured at left playing with me at one of the shelters), had a vision for a new work to be composed that was inspired by the audience. Two of those movements would be sourced entirely from this week of concerts where the audience composed with us. We would give the materials from these concerts to a composer, who would score out the music. The project was funded by The Boston Foundation’s Live Arts Boston grant.

Getting Ready

Planning sessions took place over Skype between Julie (who lives in Boston), myself (I’m in Pittsburgh), and the piece’s eventual orchestrator Danielle Williams (who lives and teaches in Palestine).

How could we get our audience to compose with us? While we knew that our audience was opinionated -- one of the best parts of a SMB concert is discussing the music with our audiences after the show -- we also knew we didn’t want to put them on the spot. We knew many of them would enter into this process without having played a musical instrument or receiving formal musical training.

We settled on the idea that we would be their “musical jukebox” (an idea that was inspired by my work at the Hillman Cancer Center). We would present different options on our instruments and ask open-ended questions that would let them guide our playing. Their opinions would be heard through us. We broke music into its puzzle pieces -- including melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, timbre, dynamics, and tempo -- to help focus our plans for each shelter.

We also knew that the process would be different at every place we went. Some locations had a separate room, and were quiet. Some enforced substance-free living. Other concerts were given in the middle of their living spaces, abutted by the sounds of running showers and flushing toilets.

Marimba Takeover: Hard Times Come Again No More

9/20/2016

Living in Pittsburgh, we pay homage to our most famous songwriter, Stephen Foster. You may know him from "Oh! Susanna" or "My Old Kentucky Home" or "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair." But he also wrote "Hard Times Come Again No More," and I find the song to transcend the decades and have meaning no matter when you're listening to it. I had been meaning to play it for a while when two friends bought a house and ran into problem after problem. I wanted to send them a clip as a joke, and then got hooked on playing it -- funny how that works.

Marimba Takeover: Ashoken Farewell

9/20/2016

This summer I played a concert in Boston, and at the end, a member of the audience asked for this song. I had never heard of it (Shame on me!), but you might well know it from Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War. In honor of her request, I've learned it. I love how this piece was written in 1982 and does have a contemporary mood but is rooted in such a rich, timeless feel.

Marimba Takeover: All Your Favorite Bands

6/30/2016

I have a soft spot a mile wide for a good anthem. So when our local radio station first played this gem of a song by Dawes (do watch it -- there is someone playing air guitar on a chicken) that culminated with the chorus wishing for us all that our favorite bands would stay together, I was hooked.

Being a musician means that when you hear a really great tune it is absolutely NOT enough to just listen to it over and over, it means you have to find a way to participate in that tune, thank you very much. So I started trying to figure out the chords and melody, wondering if I could be a piano, guitar, and voice all at once.

It was tricky. Piano chords sound good when you just play them and let them ring. But when I plunked those same chords on the marimba, it sounded a little empty. I would need to waggle my hands a bit to fill things out. But waggling wasn't enough -- the melody is actually pretty fantastically intricate, and holding four mallets meant the "voice mallet" (the one closest to the camera) was getting thrown off by the others wiggling about hilter-kilter. So I had to inform the other mallets they'd need to actually move in time, with the melody fitting in like a little puzzle. And finally, I had to get them to move in time in a way that wasn't too chunka-chunka-thud-thud -- I wanted them to feel like a nice stream of sound with the melody gliding over the top. I used three rounder, softer yarn mallets on the bottom and a cord mallet on top to try to create that sound.

Below, I'm including my chicken-scratch music, which doesn't have the voicings or accompaniment rhythms but gives both you and my brain a general idea of how it all comes together:

And below is the my full version of "All Your Favorite Bands," including a little opener and bridge not notated, which for now I'm keeping simple and hymn-style, though I have suspicions it might evolve to rock a bit more ...

Marimba Takeover: I and Love and You

6/30/2016

Oh, The Avett Brothers. They wrote the sweetest song, and it captured my heart the first time I heard it. And it sounded simple enough that I thought I might be able to combine the piano and the vocals and put something together for the marimba.

But y'all, those melodies are deceptively tricky to fit in! As simple as the melodic contour is, each time it is stated it changes just slightly in terms of rhythm, which actually makes it feel quite different! It all leads to an interesting discussion, how rhythm so beautifully affects melody depending if it is a touch more round or angular. (But it was less interesting discussion and more swear words as I tried to get it all to fit together in practice sessions.)

I must confess this version is missing something big -- in the second verse is a pretty little cello melody in the original, and I'm hoping to actually sing it over the top eventually. However, getting my voice in shape is a work in progress, so for now you can hear it without my faltering, pitchy attempts: