The Just Listening workshop began as an attempt to promote the analytical practice I call the Sound-Energy Aggregate. At a time of great distress about my own future, having had most of my teaching cut one fall, I reached out to a career coach to get help in developing a way to promote the SEA. He, Pratt Bennett, listened to me, got me to speak my belief, my hopes, my experiences, and I ended up realizing that the best way to go forward was to create a workshop based on the technique. That’s what became Just Listening.
Since the analytical approach admits a wide range of factors that create the musical experience, I simply ask what one hears, what one remembers, and build up starting points for deeper exploration based on those features. Students in classes that use the SEA approach typically leave class in an energized, engaged state. Pratt encouraged me to think of promoting the experience that created the reaction, leading me eventually to speak my motto, “Shared listening creates a sound haven that awakens compassion for self and others.” That’s important because I’ve always had difficulty promoting myself, my music. I felt that I was asking for favors when seeking performers for my pieces, and that feeling has really never left me. So being able to promote the experience and not myself was huge.
It turns out that many faculty in music schools and theory departments are rather hard to interest in an off-the-wall sounding analytical method that speaks of mysticism! Music theory classes deal almost exclusively with aspects of pitch structure. Who takes interest? It’s those who need it. Who needs it? It’s people who need a boost to their spirit: people in assisted living, music students themselves, people in compromised life situations.
The kind of empowerment that comes from having one’s words written down in front of a group exactly as said (to name an iconic example of the workshop’s process) can be the impetus to a better self image, for however short a time, for some people. So when I was heading to Los Angeles for a performance of my innovative audience-controlled and interactive piece, Groundhog Night, I contacted my cousin, Robert Morrison, to see if I could do the workshop at Housing Works CA, where he was program director (he is now Co-Executive Director). I went there in May 2022, did a workshop, and found real joy and excitement from those who participated. Robert expressed surprise at the enthusiastic participation from people who never took part in such things, and my suspicions were confirmed. So gratifying, so real to me that I reached someone like that! My experience made me want to go back for more extensive work.
In the time that passed, I gradually realized that I could do Groundhog Night with such populations, that being a co-composer in the piece could provide a sense of mattering to participants. So I worked to create a way to manage that feat, and just returned from a trip to work with a group of students from California State University at Los Angeles who performed Groundhog Night, with residents and staff of Housing Works serving as co-composers. The event was a great success (video linked here), with residents enthusiastically engaged in the process and performers deeply enjoying their role interpreting input from co-composers.
The need for such stimulation and empowerment is great among the unhoused and previously unhoused, of course, and bringing an experience that lifts the spirit is of great value to me. Many others need that kind of uplift as well, and I endeavor to spread it as widely as I can through Just Listening and Groundhog Night.