Unlike previous years I decided not to have a leader for each song, and instead we’d get a group of people to learn all the songs and be distributed around the audience. I felt like this worked pretty well, and made for more of a community sort of feeling.
In the past couple weeks, I had some thoughts in a similar vein, which I think you might have some relevant experience about.
I’ve observed (and organized) a lot of work going into songleaders and instrumentation for Solstice. This definitely seemed necessary for big solstices in the early years, especially because LessWrongfolk aren’t really filtered for musical competence and having strong songleaders is important.
But a result of this has been something of an impression that “the point of Solstice is Big High Effort musical productions”, which was actually kinda the opposite of my original intention.
High church is a nice aesthetic on it’s own – there’s a bunch of value in in a coordinated display of a community’s best. But, there’s also something nice and communal about “actually we just created the music together.” This seems pretty straightforward for the singing. One thing I’m wondering is whether it applies to instrumentation.
In the past few weeks I’ve been to some Solstice practice sessions where the person-who-was-supposed-to-do-instrumentation-for-a-given-song wasn’t there, and instead some-other-person did it. And… well, they basically just did it on the fly pretty fine.
I’ve been to folk-circle type events where, like, 7 people with guitars will follow along with the chords and improvise along with whoever is nominally performing a song. Those events have tended to be small (less than 40 people?) and tended to have particularly high musical skill. But it seems in principle like that might scale up fine to a larger room.
Do you think it’d work to have 250 people in a room, with the lyrics and chords displayed, and with a range of people with guitars or other portable instruments, with a range of skills, at least some of whom know the song well on that instrument? Probably with some kind of norm like “songs should start with accompaniment from people who are high-skill and/or know the song well, and lower-skill people join in once they get a sense of the song’s vibe”
Knobs you could tweak on this concept include:
maybe there still exists a dedicated instrumentalist assigned to each song, sitting in a central location
maybe that person has a mic so they are disproportionately audible.
still perhaps having some dedicated performance pieces in the middle
I definitely don’t think this would have worked 9 years ago but I think might work in the Bay now. (I’d definitely have a few practice meetups beforehand where people who wanted to learn the songs could do so)
One of the potential goals here isn’t just for the experience of the people on that particular year, but for a long game of “create a more musical culture.” If participating in Solstice instrumentation has a high barrier to entry, then only people who are already particularly competent are likely to see it as an aspiration. A lower bar for participation might initially produce worse sounding results, but longterm result in a community with more instrumentalists who are encouraged to level up, eventually allowing for some interesting improvisational arrangements. (compare to how, when secular solstice first started, I think the overall singing competence of the community was much lower than it is now)
I think something like what you’re describing would work best with very well known songs, or with musicians who are very good at listening and following. But I suspect that any songs people were muddling through would be pretty painful to the people without instruments.
There are a lot of aesthetics a solstice could have, but I like it best when it can make the full arc down through dark-and-serious. And I think that’s not really compatible with a room full of people with instruments.
Nod. Yes to be clear I was imagining this coming alongside some stabilization of songs into a dedicated canon. (which I think we’re closer to now)
I think I was also implicitly assuming a first skill of ‘know when you know enough about what you’re doing to know when to be silent or soft.’ I think this usually (at events I’ve been to) has been modulated by people naturally being scared of embarrassing themselves. I agree that someone not having that and some dunning-Krueger could be quite bad, esp. for the middle act.
It also does seem fine for the middle act to just be more explicitly rehearsed/perfromance-piece-y, while leaving the final upbeat songs more of an ‘everyone can join in’ thing.
Thanks for the writeup!
In the past couple weeks, I had some thoughts in a similar vein, which I think you might have some relevant experience about.
I’ve observed (and organized) a lot of work going into songleaders and instrumentation for Solstice. This definitely seemed necessary for big solstices in the early years, especially because LessWrongfolk aren’t really filtered for musical competence and having strong songleaders is important.
But a result of this has been something of an impression that “the point of Solstice is Big High Effort musical productions”, which was actually kinda the opposite of my original intention.
High church is a nice aesthetic on it’s own – there’s a bunch of value in in a coordinated display of a community’s best. But, there’s also something nice and communal about “actually we just created the music together.” This seems pretty straightforward for the singing. One thing I’m wondering is whether it applies to instrumentation.
In the past few weeks I’ve been to some Solstice practice sessions where the person-who-was-supposed-to-do-instrumentation-for-a-given-song wasn’t there, and instead some-other-person did it. And… well, they basically just did it on the fly pretty fine.
I’ve been to folk-circle type events where, like, 7 people with guitars will follow along with the chords and improvise along with whoever is nominally performing a song. Those events have tended to be small (less than 40 people?) and tended to have particularly high musical skill. But it seems in principle like that might scale up fine to a larger room.
Do you think it’d work to have 250 people in a room, with the lyrics and chords displayed, and with a range of people with guitars or other portable instruments, with a range of skills, at least some of whom know the song well on that instrument? Probably with some kind of norm like “songs should start with accompaniment from people who are high-skill and/or know the song well, and lower-skill people join in once they get a sense of the song’s vibe”
Knobs you could tweak on this concept include:
maybe there still exists a dedicated instrumentalist assigned to each song, sitting in a central location
maybe that person has a mic so they are disproportionately audible.
still perhaps having some dedicated performance pieces in the middle
I definitely don’t think this would have worked 9 years ago but I think might work in the Bay now. (I’d definitely have a few practice meetups beforehand where people who wanted to learn the songs could do so)
One of the potential goals here isn’t just for the experience of the people on that particular year, but for a long game of “create a more musical culture.” If participating in Solstice instrumentation has a high barrier to entry, then only people who are already particularly competent are likely to see it as an aspiration. A lower bar for participation might initially produce worse sounding results, but longterm result in a community with more instrumentalists who are encouraged to level up, eventually allowing for some interesting improvisational arrangements. (compare to how, when secular solstice first started, I think the overall singing competence of the community was much lower than it is now)
I think something like what you’re describing would work best with very well known songs, or with musicians who are very good at listening and following. But I suspect that any songs people were muddling through would be pretty painful to the people without instruments.
There are a lot of aesthetics a solstice could have, but I like it best when it can make the full arc down through dark-and-serious. And I think that’s not really compatible with a room full of people with instruments.
Nod. Yes to be clear I was imagining this coming alongside some stabilization of songs into a dedicated canon. (which I think we’re closer to now)
I think I was also implicitly assuming a first skill of ‘know when you know enough about what you’re doing to know when to be silent or soft.’ I think this usually (at events I’ve been to) has been modulated by people naturally being scared of embarrassing themselves. I agree that someone not having that and some dunning-Krueger could be quite bad, esp. for the middle act.
It also does seem fine for the middle act to just be more explicitly rehearsed/perfromance-piece-y, while leaving the final upbeat songs more of an ‘everyone can join in’ thing.