After the Music Workshop

The workshop at the Bridge Arts Gallery in Castleford on 2.October went well. We had five participants with a varied background: some with professional music experience, others with a general interest in music and arts. The first half of the workshop I presented the general concepts of making music with a computer. After lunch with good fish&chips from a nearby outlet we continued to explore the use of a sequencer for music making. I demonstrated some of the sounds of the Garritan Personal Orchestra sample library. Then I played the first movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No.1 through the sequencer. The participants, most of them in general not very fond of classical music, found it very enlightning to see the visual indication of the music structure in the piano roll: each voice had its own color, and one could observe the up and down motion of these voices. A teacher saw the great possibilities of this for introducing children to music. Also the intuitive note editing of sound duration through the length of the note bars on the piano roll view appeared to the participants as a major step forward from the traditional 5-line note staff view.

We did not have time to actually start a joint collaborative composition of our own, as I had originally envisioned - we may do this at another time.