An Introduction

At the beginning of April 2025, I was given another exciting opportunity with the incredible creative workshop group to put together another project. This project we, eventually, gave the name “No Way Out“.

As a group we had previously worked on several other projects together, this meant we were very well-introduced to each other, and had plenty experience and time spent together already, which is always a good start to a project. This project has opened up new techniques of improvisation, time-efficient team work, collaboration skills, and has also pushed past personal boundaries, particularly around communication and expression.

In this reflection, I will provide a more personal and analytical perspective on the creation of a musical project. I will explore how a group of young musicians embarking on their careers and pursuing further education in music performance collaborate to combine their individual musical knowledge and expertise into a novel and distinctive artistic work.

Starting Off

The idea for “No Way Out” came to us through group discussions and planning, within one of our workshop lessons. We began with discussions on topics and themes, a technique we’ve started previous projects with, and adapted and developed from there.

Artistic Influences

As we furthered our discussion, our ideas morphed into many different forms of dance music; we introduced the idea of bringing an “old skool” vibe to the song, embracing classic examples of 90’s dance music such as ‘Orbital’, and also discussed DnB as a potential direction as well.

We continued to discuss and dabble in the many sub genres of dance music, jumping ahead a couple of decades and discussing modern artists such as ‘PinkPantheress’ (Pantheress, 2021), whilst also considering each member of the group and what roll we can all play within this interpretation. Once we acknowledged the instrumentation we finally landed onto the topic of “Imogen Heap” and her innovative ways of creating and forming music, specifically a piece from her “NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert”, called ‘Hide and Seek’ ( NPRMusic, 2019). In this live performance she presents a device called the Mi-Mu Glove, which were essentially gloves that could control multiple aspects of sound and other musical effects. With these gloves she creates a lovely techno/spiritual accapela. We wanted to take the atmospheric feel of the song and interpret that feeling in our own way. Nonetheless further influence could have been a lot more useful to the overall development, as we had spent a while trying to base our interpretation off of one idea, extending our research and being a lot more efficient with our time would have resulted in a more put together product.

Improvisation as composition

For this project, we used the process of improvisation to build the overall foundations of the song. Our guitarist came up with a chord progression to start off with, after discussion on what sort of progression would fit this theme we managed to write up a rough structure and from there we continued to develop the tune. We decided that our pianist would play a triplet pattern over the chord changes and our saxophone player would play alongside the changes to add more character and feel to the song, with our keyboard player playing an electric synth bass and lead singer implementing a delay effect into her singing to keep our interpretation close to vibe of Imogen Heap.

As for me, (on the drums), and our lead guitarist, we gave the song a different feel. I followed the song with a ‘laid-back’ soul rhythm, along with the lead guitarist who was soloing in a blues style over the tune, giving the song a unique feel. I think this was pretty important for the song, as the song was becoming too ‘monophonic’ and needed more texture and development. To further touch on the feel of the song I experimented with different types of sticks; starting off with standard sticks and then going to brushes and then further on to felt mallets in order to get as close to an “atmospheric” feel as I could, this has opened up new stylistic techniques to my playing and has helped substantially to my personal development as i have previously not had much experience with other playing styles.

In our first recording, listening back I felt the drums were too heavy in the overall mix, whilst playing with standard sticks helped drive the song, they felt too sharp and overpowering, especially in the intro. So, alongside the felt mallets I also focussed on my dynamic control, in order to fully procure a rhythm that sits comfortably within the tune.

I tend to put emotion into my playing when it comes to improvisation, as my fellow band mate and friend mentions in her forum post, “What is musical creativity?”;

“I love to freestyle and improvise a lot so creativity id say is my main strong suit in music, it helps me to create new and exiting music and lyrics using my emotions and feelings and experiences.” (Collinson, 2024)

I relate to this statement as, especially in this project, emotion has been a key part of our discussion and development of this tune, it has also meant we can really discuss in depth about how we want to interpret and present these emotions within the composition, resulting in great communication and discussion within the group.

Conclusion

Overall, this project opened up new forms of discussion, bringing us more closer together whilst also allowing us to be more creative and express our own personal emotions separately within the tune. I have developed my skill and technique in drumming with the use of new equipment to emphasise texture and dynamics, and have uncovered new forms of improvisation.

There is, of course, always room for improvement. For instance, the structure seemed quite repetitive, whilst the amount of time we were given may have been short, there was still time to at least add a bit of structure to it, this is a process we could fit into the discussion phase of the project next time we have the opportunity.

Regardless, Our strengths this project, at least personally to me, have been our ability to discuss and experiment with different techniques, using both patience and research to construct a piece that we are happy with and also have some form of emotional connection to.

Bibliography:

Collinson, S. (2024) ‘What is musical creativity?’, Space. Sas C, 6 December. Available at: https://space.leedsconservatoire.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=11112#p14435 (Accessed: 13 May 2025).

Music, N. (2019) NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QtklTXbKUQ (Accessed: 13 May 2025).

Orbital (2009) Halcyon On and On, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-hSgL1R74 (Accessed: 13 May 2025).

Pantheress, P. (2021) Break it off, YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tPTrgGptU0 (Accessed: 13 May 2025).