I got to spend my time this semester working with the residents at the Gemeinschaft home, helping the residents use their stories to inspire songwriting and music making. This experience really changed me in so many aspects of my life.
As an educator, I got the opportunity to collaborate with social work students. Getting to work with them really opened up a new way of engaging students in general. The students really knew how to ask open and guided questions and they got the residents to be productive without the residents feeling forced into it. After talking to the men after our last session about what they thought about the experience, at least with the men I spoke to, they said that there was nothing they would change (besides having everyone in one room, seeing as it gets crowded, loud, and overwhelming very quickly). The residents I spoke to were sad to see us go, and while some of them said they won't continue necessarily songwriting, they did say that they would journal more, start getting into poetry, or just writing down anything they think is interesting. Some of the residents are very excited to continue music, however. One of the residents took a particular liking to the ukulele, and for the last session, he asked if he could mess around with it. I told him that there's ukulele chords for almost any song he could imagine, and I could see his eyes kind of light up. He told me as soon as he was able, he was gonna get a ukulele and learn some songs. I got to teach him some chords too (FM and CM), and he seemed very excited to learn about this. This is why I want to teach students of any/all ages. I want to be able to provide that sort of light for as many as people as possible, and open music up to everyone. One of the men said to me that he was too old to learn an instrument, as much as he would've loved to do it. At the last session as everyone was coming in, he was playing away on the guitar. I want to be able to do that for anyone who wants to be involved in music. As a musician, this tested me a bit. I had never really done any musical improvisation before, and this whole project was just kind of me improvising music. The residents have a sound in mind for how they want their songs to sound. Unfortunately for me, I am not proficient on guitar, and most of the resident's songs wanted guitar. So if any of the residents ever wanted piano or percussion of any kind, I was ready. I learned quickly how to get to what sound the residents wanted quickly, but at first, I'd try to be too technical with it. I would say "Major or minor? 4/4? What chord progression?", and after doing that once and failing horribly, I realized that was not going to work. I observed how the social work students went about asking the residents and went from there. I still asked major or minor, but I would just play different chords and see if any stuck out, play in different registers of the piano to see what they liked, and went from there. As a human being, it really opened me up to a lot of new perspectives. I got to hear life stories from so many individuals. Talking with the residents about their lives not only gave them inspiration and more ideas for their song writing, but it also inspired me, especially if the song was about a specific person, to want to make the song as best as possible and as close to the sound as the resident wants in order to create the best product that they will feel proud of and best represents what their intentions were with their song.
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