Melody is a powerful tool in composition. It slips into our memory like a singular, clear thing, almost like an image. When we play a melody, there is a lot of time to notice other things, but we don’t always do that – our minds can close off, absorbed by the relation of the present tone to the tones in the past. This might be the reason why some improvising musicians eradicate the option of melody in their music. I don’t do that, but I keep studying when is the moment for a melody an how to keep my ears, eyes, options and mind open once I’ve started it.
In the workshop we will look at melody from different mindsets and switch between them. We will work from playing with noise, sounds, timbre, range, dynamics, density, layering, silence, movement, text and space, and eventually find melodies in this ‘fungus’. We will also use the approach of listening to the fungus in and around our melodies and letting them decompose.