Workshops, Weaving & Whisky
8th June 2015Singer and flutist Sarah Hayes reflects on the connections and interactions she found with singer Sara Kazmi during our City to City (Glasgow to Lahore) project.
I spent a truly immersive week with Highlight Arts in May. While poets from Glasgow and Lahore workshopped new ‘transcreations’ of each other’s work, singer Sara Kazmi and I were in the room above, busily putting together a musical collaboration to feature alongside their readings. It was a completely new challenge for us both to make a cross-genre, cross-cultural collaboration of this kind. And in three and a half days!
Sara and I quickly found a number of connections between our respective folk traditions. Some concerned common features of both, such as storytelling, repetition, and music for dancing. Others related thematically (the textile industry in Glasgow and Lahore, bird and animal imagery illustrating wider subjects). We brought together music with a tradition or function (a pipe march to be played at the end of the day, and a song to bring rain), contrasted songs and poetry from female and male perspectives, and explored their use of metaphor (spinning wheels and anthropomorphised alcohol).
A trickier aspect of the workshops came in articulating the musical theory behind our new work. Even when writing with regular bandmates, it’s fairly common to have different ideas of what to call certain sections (eg bridge, pre-chorus) and how to talk about the music you’re making in a rehearsal setting. Some people picture music largely in terms of form and use that kind of structural vocabulary to describe it (‘somewhere between verse three and four we need another bridge section’), while others use lyrics as a framework (‘what happens after “Love is all you need?”’) Others are thinking about the harmonic flow of the music as a way to map it out (‘let’s go from the G7 chord’), and more often it’s a combination of all of these to some degree. So a part of the process when working with someone new is establishing a way of describing the music that suits you both. Sara and I come from two different musical systems, so this added another layer to the discussion. We encountered some diversion between the following: interaction between melody and harmony/accompaniment, improvisation and composition, modes and key signatures, rhythmic patterns and beat cycles, fixed scales and microtones…notes in between the notes! It’s been great to approach things in a different way, and make small inroads into broadening my knowledge of another system, thanks to a crash course from Sara. I’m a firm believer that all musical experiences inform each other, and look forward to seeing how this one finds its way through into future work.
Having lived in Glasgow for almost ten years, it was a pleasure to welcome our visitors from Lahore, view the city through new eyes – a walking tour of the city centre armed me with some pub quiz facts – and also spend time with people from the world of poetry. With musicians and poets working separately for the week, we heard each other’s work for the first time at the Glasgow and London performances; I loved hearing what the poets had produced together, and about the conversations opened up by the writing process. It was a total joy to sing and play music with Sara, and I hope we can do it again sometime in the future. Thanks to Highlight Arts, Alchemy and the British Council for this exciting and illuminating project.
Sarah Hayes is a singer and flute player from Northumberland. She moved to Glasgow in 2005, where she leads a varied musical life, performing and teaching across a range of settings. Sarah plays in three classical chamber groups and folk trio Wildings, and is also a member of indie-pop band Admiral Fallow, who have toured the UK, Europe, USA and Australia, and released two albums to critical acclaim. Her Celtic Connections New Voices commission, Woven, premiered at the festival in January 2014 and earned a five star review in the Scotsman newspaper. A studio recording of Woven is due for release in autumn 2015.
