Artist’s Blog: Ríona Sally Hartman – Nomad 2024

Nomad 2024 took place in South City CNS in Dublin. Working with musicians Ríona Sally Hartman, Dominic Mullen, and Claire Sherry, an excited group of 4^th class students – and their teachers! - participated in 5 workshops at their school, culminating in a performance at the school’s Wellness Day. The workshops included improvisation and songwriting, which Riona details in her own words below:

We started the first workshop by experimenting with conducting, using gymnasts' ribbons (long colorful ribbons on the end of a baton that you can twirl and spin in the air). I sang and Dominic Mullen played drums, improvising freely in reaction to the children’s movements with the ribbons. We began very free, without discussing or deciding how we would react musically to any given movement. Naturally the children started noticing, and emphasizing through repetition and contrast, associations between certain movements and corresponding musical sounds: for example, moving the ribbons gracefully would often result in long, sustained sounds, in contrast moving the ribbon more frantically would result in more explosive sounds

After some time experimenting with this, we began taking breaks between turns to discuss what we heard and observed each time. We began collectively defining our parameters for the piece of music by deciding on which movements were cues for which particular sounds; for example, spinning the ribbon in a circle above the head would cue a snare roll, keeping the ribbon mostly on the floor and then flicking the baton up so the ribbon quickly flicked into the air would cue a cymbal splash. In this way, by gradually defining our parameters, we collectively composed our first improvised piece.

Throughout the workshops over the following two weeks, we returned to this improvised piece in different ways; sometimes with the children improvising themselves on instruments or their voices, adding and removing parameters, drawing “maps” to pre-decide the arc of the piece before performing…etc.

Next for our first songwriting exercise we started with some deep listening. With a timer on we sat in silence for a few minutes and listened very closely to what we could hear around us. Afterwards we discussed what we had heard, which sounds we could easily identify and which we couldn’t. Then we tried a variation on the exercise where we imagined that instead of being in this room, that we were in another space and time. We sat in silence and listened closely to the imagined sounds in this other space and time. We discussed the real sounds we’d heard as well as the imagined ones and began brainstorming lyrics for two songs. One became Are You Listening, a gentle folk-ish song about listening closely to the world around you, and the other was Pug On A Motorbike, an energetic nonsense song that described all sorts of unusual characters in unexpected scenarios.

In the final workshop the children performed their improvised piece, their two new songs and another call and response blues game, for their schoolmates accompanied by Dominic Mullen on drums and Claire Sherry on violin and banjo. Their teacher, Ms. Harrington, also joined them on guitar for one song.

Throughout the workshops the children were all super engaged, ready to share ideas and very open to trying out new ways of exploring music collectively. I’ve done a lot of variations of the “conducting improvisation” exercise over the years with different groups of children in different settings and these workshops had me reflect often on the importance of getting the right balance between giving the children enough direction when necessary and leaving enough space to allow the children to bump up against natural obstacles like the music becoming stagnant or repetitive. By not jumping in and solving it immediately, allowing the children to notice the problem, hesitate, get bored with the sounds that are being produced and try solving it themselves, you’re giving them space to find their own solutions and build their confidence in making musical decisions in the process. So often in children’s music, the emphasis is put on children learning a technical skill on an instrument, often in one-on-one lessons. I so enjoyed this opportunity to make music outside of that setting, using collective improvisation and songwriting while integrating dance and movement.

NOMAD is presented by The Ark in collaboration with Zonzo Compagnie, based on a format developed and owned by Zonzo Compagnie.

About Ríona Hartman

Ríona Sally Hartman is a musician based in South County Wicklow who holds an honours Bachelor of Arts in Jazz Performance. She releases her own original music under her own name, as well as collaborating with a number of ensembles of various genres including Irish language band IMLÉ and bilingual group Luí Lom (music in Gàidhlig and Irish). She is musical director and lead performer of The National Concert Hall’s Education and Community Outreach Band, and facilitates early years workshops in the National Concert Hall.