Departing from a Recording

This item is not in the library — it is a part of: C. Bergstrøm-Nielsen, Intuitive Music: A Mini Handbook.

Listen to a recording. If the exercise is to be easy, choose something that is not too difficult to imitate (it could be from improvised or experimental music). Play for a while imitating it after listening is finished. Play for a while “doing the opposite”. As this is a rather ambiguous notion, funny things may happen while participants still have their individual ideas about this opposite. Play on inventing new instructions relating in some way to what was before — “something different” — “like before, but…” — “as before, but with faster/slower tempo”, etc.

This exercise will combine excellently with (GRD) Dividing the Group (↓). Difference in playing may come out of groups simply playing alternatingly without necessarily being instructed.


The wording above is by Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, as written in Intuitive Music: A Mini-Handbook, licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 (Bergstrøm-Nielsen 2009, 10)



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