Here is more detail.

Collaborative Vocal Improvisation (CVI) is a novel (and ancient) approach to singing whereby groups improvise together with their voices, in musically satisfying ways.

CVI values: creating together · shared leadership · emergence · musicality, listening · lyrics, groove, harmony, melody · structure, freedom, play, creativity, spirituality, excellence. Genre influences include jazz, gospel, RnB, classical + whatever you bring!

CVI has been pioneered by Rhiannon, Joey Blake, David Worm and others in Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra community in the U.S. from the 1980s onwards, beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

The style is now spreading internationally, primarily through their teaching, and now their students’ teaching (Briony included) - because it’s super fun, deep, thrilling and we love it!

The Music Room: Music Theory taught through the voice, ear and body

In the Music Room we study ‘chops’ and patiently cultivate our competency with rhythm, harmony, melody and instrumental (in this case, vocal) technique. We then apply those skills creatively through improvisation and ear-based singing and playing.

Through studying with an amazing array of teachers from across the world and teaching music full time for 8 years, Briony has developed a pedagogy for teaching music theory through the voice, ear and body in ways that can be directly applied to improvised singing and playing.

Music Room study goes Level 1 (beginner) to Level 4 (professional / graduate). This is primarily for singers, and also works for instrumentalists wishing to study music theory through through the voice ear and body. 

Rhythm

A whole journey from counting to 4,  reaching to 16th-note patterns, polyrhythms, oddmeter and transcribing Shabaka Hutchings’ solos.

Harmony

Starting with simply becoming able to hear two simultaneous notes, to understanding, recognising and creating music using ‘structural diatonic harmony’ (chords numbered I through VII in major and minor keys), chord inversion and elaboration, cadences and becoming increasingly able to harmonise melodies effortlessly and beautifully.

Melody

We begin with the do-re-mi (or the Sa Re Ga): learning scales, degrees and intervals, and using them to create melodies. This continues and elaborates: the scales and intervals vary, fuse with rhythm, add some heart and soul plus a touch of spiritual surrender and wow… we have magic. Aka music.

Technique

Vocal technique is fused into the study of rhythm, harmony and melody. We add also the Resonant Body method to bring out the full potential of each unique voice, brush off its natural magnificence and help it to sing with strength, ease, health and inherent grace, at any age.

Creativity

We then use all of this, in the never-ending journey of musicianship, to make music, for ourselves, for one another, for those we offer music to. 

The Temple

Bow upon entry, or raise your arms and sing in awe. You were born an instrument. We live in a sacred universe, every tree, river, plant and song humming and dancing with Life, this big family we belong soulfully within. The temple invites the heart and soul, connects us with this bigger aliveness, and nurtures our wellbeing and communion with all of life. 

In the temple aspects of improvisation we work with:

<3 n Soul

When you open your mouth to sing within the blank canvas of improvisation, pretty soon your heart and soul, your inner life, realises it has a channel, and like it or not, it starts to pour out of your voice and fill the surrounding air for all to hear. 

Through vocal improvisation we express ourselves authentically. We sing our truth, and we support and receive that of others.  It takes a bit of getting used to. And it’s extremely touching to participate in and witness.

Initially we tend to just sing our own heart and soul. It often takes a while to clear residue from that pipe. Yet when we do, that pipe can become a clear channel for bigger Soul; for a wider field to sing the songs of now through us.

Connection

It takes safety to do this work, and it takes tribe. Vocal improvisation is a vulnerable art form and we can support one another’s heart and soul through singing forms, and ways of relating that rest on the fulcrum of truth, transparency and mutual support. We listen to ourselves, we listen to each other. We create together, no one above the other. Sometimes I solo and you support; sometimes you solo and I support. We weave a tribe where the individual and the group both matter and mutually contribute to one another’s flourishing.

The Body

The body is our instrument. We feel it through ‘interoception’; feeling sensation within the body. We invite the voice deeply and fully into the body. We give the body skilled care, because we are living instruments; and our bodies are sacred gifts from the genius of Nature for these lifetimes. We practice substance-independence; for we can navigate the energetic ride of living and musicianship in non-toxic ways. This is skill. We orient towards natural health, and singing is an integral part of that.

Healing

What depths are these? The trauma in our culture that runs through family systems, generation after generation. It stores in our bodies, our lived experience and our deep memory. When we invite voice and sensation into the body, we hit on the grief and trauma stored in our tissues and learn to work with it, as a human, as a group. The improvising voice will sooner or later sing the songs of the inner life and in hearing those songs we come to know ourselves more intimately. Our suffering is expressed, then almost immediately met by the resourcing wisdom of the voice as it regulates the nervous system and connects to our healthy selves which know how to care for, digest and transform the suffering. There is a kind of a “call and response” - within an individual, between an individual and a group, perhaps between the human and the more-than-human - where the call of suffering is met with a response of nurturing; where love is applied to the places that hurt, and somehow, they heal. 

Ritual

Ritual is a technology for connection between people, groups, place, more-than-human nature, and Bigger Aliveness. Humans have been practicing and inventing and re-inventing ritual for as long as we have existed. It’s in our DNA.

Improvised singing serves ritual because we can sing the song of now: the song of this marriage, this season, this death, this birth, this group, this land, this dawn, this sunset.

When we become vocal improvisers, we become Ritual Singers.

Some of Briony’s programs make explicit use of ritual; seasonal rituals, initiation through the life cycle, grief rituals, student-created rituals. Perhaps singing is always and essentially a ritual; a technology of connection.

What will you do with this rich and profound art form?

It evolves through its practitioners and communities.

Here we go…..

The Void

Immediately prior to improvising we rest in the void; the emptiness, the listening, the not-knowing. We “put our bags down” - the bags of our plans, desires and striving.

We listen.

Out of that void, music comes

That is the music we follow.

Earth-Based Spirituality

Improvisation is central to Hindustani Classical Music in India. They says that when you’re improvising, God is singing through you. It is also central to Zimbabwean Shona music. With an Ancestral religious life, the Shona say that when you’re improvising, the Ancestors are singing through you.

Me, I’m a kind of inter-spiritual 2020 Daoist Pagan with large doses of Native American influence.

My worldview rests on the Lakota phrase “Aho Mitakuye Oyasin” - hello to all my relations. The waters, the plants, the creatures rocks soils sun and air, humans male, female, two spirit, old, young, ancestors, the unborn, in a web of family, no one more important than the other.

Not a top-down triangle with humans at the top. Rather, a circle, with humans in a web; each part living, sacred, sentient; and our job as humans to seek our healthy place in that whole.

So when we improvise, and particularly when we feel we’re being sung, my story of that is that Nature is singing us; ecological genius is singing all of us together; we’re being carried like coasting flocks of birds on the air currents of aliveness. We’re relaxing our separate consciousness and entering into a wider consciousness,  closer communion with a bigger aliveness. 

This is the spirituality that I and my work are rooted in.