Educational Uses
Just the performance, with guest performers
Participants experience the empowerment of directing the course of the music as co-composers, the stimulus to examine their reactions to music, and have fun while doing so. The realization that how one plays the notes, and how one’s part relates to others allows any performer to better understand their role in creating musical energy. Greater attention to the directions of conductors, to the nuances of their own playing and the sound complex they help to create is bound to result simply from experiencing a realization of Groundhog Night.
Realizations at Somerville High School and Maynard High School are of this type.
Just the performance, with your performers
This version will expose your students to new kinds of notation and allow them to improvise according to input from co-composers. One way to do that would be to rehearse ahead of time with JHM, another would be to do the entire realization, from initial encounter with the score through rehearsal and then through realization with audience rating energy in a continuous flow. The time required for such an event would be in the neighborhood of 2 hours. For an example of this process, see the realization linked on this site from Divergent Studio.
Performance with Just Listening preceding or following
When a session of the Just Listening (JL) workshop is experienced by a group a day or so before the Groundhog Night (GN) experience, participants will have a growing sense of the depth and subtleties of music that will be carried further by Groundhog Night. Individuals will have stated simply what they perceive and will have witnessed the growth of a communal analysis of a style or selection of music they had never heard before. Most likely they will have identified important features of that music, such as dynamics, articulation, and sound quality, that lie beyond the usual reliance on pitch that dominates academic musical analysis. The importance of open-minded reception of something unfamiliar — in essence, the importance of embracing “not knowing” — will have been demonstrated through experience.
All these factors will be deepened by the Groundhog Night experience. It’s hard to say whether doing GN before or after Just Listening is better. If GN comes first, the experience of colleagues making remarks, directing the course of the music and so forth will likely open a greater level of receptivity for the lessons of JL, and make it more comprehensible, more impactful.
Groundhog Night, Just Listening, SEA
All the comments above, except for the not-knowing state of awareness (= beginner’s mind), derive from the Sound-Energy Aggregate theory. (In sum, the idea is that any musical parameter can insert, support, or alter the energy of another parameter, producing an energy aggregate.) For those in higher levels of education (whatever the age of students!), an in-depth look at the tenets of the theory will help all the threads to coalesce, and transform thinking about music theory. The fact that one’s lifelong experience in music is immediately available to understand or explain music’s impact can spark deeper interest in a whole range of theoretical concepts.
For a college group, I would recommend utilizing all three facets of the experience. A high school group might only do the JL-GN pair, or just JL or GN. One way or the other, minds are likely to be stimulated, liberated, and refreshed.
Social Uses
One of the primary ways a realization of Groundhog Night can have great value is that it is able to bring a sense of empowerment to those who rarely feel so. Giving co-composers the opportunity to alter the way music is played is bound to convey a sense of importance, and simply having one's opinion about the energy of a musical passage be taken seriously is likewise to say that the person matters. Of course, both of the impacts can be of great value to marginalized populations, and Groundhog Night or Just Listening might be done repeatedly or worked into a larger web of experiences an organiation or group may devise.
Any group will come to know each other better, to learn about each other in ways that are outside the normal realm of their interactions, and form a greater sense of commmunity. This is especially the case if Groundhog Night is paired with Just Listening. The realizations about music that emerge — especially those that elevate the insights of non-specialists — are bound to spread among a group, create greater respect for some in a group, and live for a long time in the minds of those who take part.
And it's fun!
Something very important about the experience is that it is a lot of fun for everyone! It has been shown that people remember things much better if they have fun while learning. Groundhog Night is in fact a demonstration of a theory in real time, but it might take a long time for someone to fully realize what they learn from it. The fun likely delivers the varied lessons to more memorable locations in our brains, memories that then continue to pop up for longer. Of course I speculate about why fun makes learning more effective, but there's no doubt that a realization of Groundhog Night is fun!