 |
| Visit at http://www.educationjustice.net |
Are you anxious?
“Are you
anxious?” asked one of the participants during a break in our 2-hour session.
It was an understandable question – I was sitting in a classroom at the
Danville Correctional Center in Danville, Illinois, giving a workshop on
creativity to seven incarcerated men. I was there under the auspices of the
University of Illinois’ Education Justice Project, running one of two sessions
that I’ll be giving at the prison as part of my Composer-in-Residence position with
the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra. It certainly was a new situation for
me, from passing though the several security checkpoints while carrying only a
clear plastic bag with my belongings, to finding myself completely surrounded
by male inmates and guards. It was also a warm and humid day in late June, and
the air conditioner was temporarily out in the Vocational Building, which made
for balmy conditions inside the classroom. So yes, I was certainly feeling the
uniqueness of the situation. But I was also experiencing quite an adrenaline
rush, the type I used to get from classroom teaching when I formerly taught at
Roosevelt University and that I’ve not felt in quite awhile. It was
exhilarating! I had walked into the prison, not knowing how the participants
would respond to my workshop; halfway through it, they were energetically
taking part in my lesson plan, and I was felt a sense of community building as
we delved into the creative process together.
Some statistics...
My interest
in bringing creativity into prisons has been growing for years. Music has the
power to inspire and to empower, and learning to tap into one’s creativity can
help people discover their potential in both musical and non-musical aspects of
their lives. Why is this important? Because the United States, on average,
incarcerates its population at five times the rate of most other countries
throughout the world. According to www.prisonpolicy.com, we incarcerate 698
people for every 100,000; in comparison, England incarcerates 141 people per
100,000, Canada stands at 114 per 100,000 and Norway at 74 per 100,000. When we
compare our numbers to those in countries with authoritarian or communist rule,
civil unrest, or varying amounts of government instability, the U.S. is well ahead
in the numbers too, with Cuba at 510 per 100,000, Rwanda at 434 per 100,000,
and China at 118 per 100,000 (see these statistics and more at
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2018.html). In addition to our high
incarceration numbers, we have another issue of how the prison population is
being prepared for re-entry to society, and whether we are giving them needed
skills and help so that they won’t end up back in the prison system. I’m a
beginner in learning how learning how our country can tackle these issues, and
as such, I am very interested in exploring what role I can serve in helping
incarcerated men and women explore their fullest potential and successfully
re-integrate back into society upon release.
Workshop, Part I
In the first
hour, I led the participants through a discussion of how a composer composes.
We started with the non-musical aspects, which involve using both subjectivity
and objectivity to inform one’s choices, as well as making a steady stream of
small decisions to ward off what I call the “two-headed dragon” of procrastination
and perfectionism (I explore this concept in Blog 52: Procrastination & Perfectionism: Slaying theTwo-Headed Dragon).
Next, I
introduced basic music vocabulary that we used throughout the rest of the workshop:
formal structure, tension/relaxation, pitch, rhythm, silence, color/timbre, dynamics,
and so on. The participants immediately caught on to the idea of formal
structure when I demonstrated how the tune Happy
Birthday is constructed. We then applied our newly learned terminology by
analyzing the text and formal structure of my choral piece Give Me Hunger (we listened to Chanticleer’s rendition of the
piece). By the end of the first hour, the participants were grasping the
concepts we had discussed thus far and asking great questions to further their
understanding.
Workshop, Part II
The second
hour proved to be very inspirational. I informed the group that we were going
to create a piece using graphic notation, which we’d then perform ourselves. At
that moment, they transformed into students you’d find in any classroom anywhere in
the world – first, they were concerned and unsure of taking part, then they
progressively warmed up to the idea, and eventually took ownership of the
exercise. On the chalkboard, I drew a graph of a piece that started with relatively
high tension and lots of chaos. About two-thirds of the way through the graph,
there was a silence, followed by a quiet, orderly ending in which the
participants could choose to whistle or hum. While the participants started off
reserved in their vocal realizations of the piece, they eventually began making
suggestions for improvements: what would happen if we start with the highest tension found in the piece? What does it
sound like if you whistle and hum at the same time? What if the tension slowly
winds down from chaos to order instead of having an instant drop in the tension
level? We experimented, analyzed our results, loosened up, experimented some
more, and made quite a boisterous commotion in the process.
Homework for next visit
The final
order of business was the assigning of homework for my next visit. I’ll be
returning to the Danville Correctional Center on September 26th, where we will
have a 3-hour event called “Messages to Gaia.” The movements of my String Quartet
No. 3: Gaia will performed (hopefully
by live musicians if we can secure permission; otherwise, we will play a
recording), as well as my solo woodwind piece Phoenix Rising. Between movements of these works, the participants
will be reading texts from my oratorio Terra
Nostra penned by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wendell Berry, and Walt Whitman, among others. For the first part of the homework assignment, the participants
each chose what readings they’d like to give at the September concert. For the
second part, I informed them that everyone is to create something for our
concert. This can be a piece of art, a poem or short story, their own graphic
notation piece that they will teach the audience, or anything else they would
like to do. The participants were a bit unsure of the assignment, so we talked
about various options they could explore. They have a few months to work on
their projects, and I am excited to see what they produce!
Thank you!
Thank you
Rebecca Ginsburg, Director of the Education Justice Project, and René Francisco
Poitevin, Director of EJP’s Academic Programs, for making arrangements for me
to visit the prison, as well as David Sharpe, the Co-Coordinator of the
Mindfulness EJP discussion group, and Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra’s
Executive Director Gerri Kirchner for both accompanying me to the prison. Special thanks
to David Sharpe for asking me in September 2017 if I’d be interested in doing
some workshops within EJP as part of my orchestral residence; his
inquiry has resulted in a meaningful experience for us all.
