Songwriting workshop report

This weekend was almost entirely taken up by a songwriting workshop at Kathy Mar's. It was thinly attended -- only four students on Saturday, and two didn't make it to the Sunday session due to health problems in one case and a scheduling conflict in the other. But we had a blast anyway, and who am I to turn down free food?

The format was that each of the four teachers lectured for an hour, answered questions for an hour, and workshopped for an hour. In practice the lines between the three were extremely fuzzy, and the general atmosphere was more like a graduate seminar or one of the tech-transfer sessions I'm familiar with from work.

The Saturday morning session was Kathy's introduction to songwriting; Saturday afternoon was Jeff Bohnhoff on parody. His session included actually writing a parody, in the group. Much fun; it'll turn up in a one-shot at Consonance, so I won't spoil the surprise.

The Sunday morning session was me. Since everyone else was concentrating mainly on the words, I decided to talk mainly about writing original melodies, with side-trips into the revision feedback loop, the benefits of noodling, and some of the challenges involved in setting poetry to music. I'd written up some notes in the form of an article, then presented off-the-cuff with my hardcopy as notes. Worked pretty well.

This afternoon's session was Bob Kanefsky's course in advanced parody -- he had gone so far as to make up a set of slides in Keynote, which were both informative and quite entertaining. I skipped this evening's meal (roasted chicken) in favor of getting home in time to go out for dinner with the family -- we figured we owed the chaoswolf a congratulatory dinner.

On the whole I'd say it went well. I think everybody -- not just the students -- had fun and most, if not all, of us came away with some new and useful information.