“Ready or Not” imagines our human journeys, through the image of packing a magic suitcase. At first whimsical, like Mary Poppins’ carpet bag, the song also moves us to the journeys taken as forced migration, the refugee’s journey, packing quickly the things most precious, tangible and intangible, objects as well as memories.
I met creator Elise Witt online during the pandemic, when we were both in a course led by the extraordinary improviser Rhiannon… I was honored, because I already knew of Elise as a composer of unusual choral work that I had explored doing with my community chorus. In fact this piece was conceived as a choral piece, and Elise very generously let me excerpt a bit of it to be a pocket song.
An archive of Collaborative projects between Elise and the Daily Antidote of Song!
How do we deal with the many feelings we experience while stuck at home and living through a pandemic? For some GVP students, the answer is through songwriting. A new student-led Songwriters’ Club has flourished at GVP as a unique space for students to explore composing their own songs and remixing others’. Students meet weekly via Zoom to workshop original lyrics and share their latest creations with peers. They swap techniques for using GarageBand, a digital music creation studio available on their iPads. And the finished products are impressive: as STEAM Coordinator Danielle Ereddia says, “It’s not only that students are writing lyrics, they’re writing melodies and using loops, voice filters, and instruments on GarageBand to construct multi-layered songs…with up to 14 different tracks on one song.”
This interview was conducted on May 12, 2021 by Emilie Amrein and André de Quadros, founders of the Choral Commons.