Fengaros Music Village workshops offer range of skills

Music in the village is back this summer. A week before the 10^th anniversary edition of the Fengaros Festival, the Fengaros Music Village will take place in Kato Drys with industry professionals teaching nine workshops. From July 21 to 26, invited musicians and guests will lead a series of workshops that focus on drumming, orchestration and arrangement, jazz, and folk music traditions.

Antonia Charalambous and Athina Kassiou will host a workshop titled From the Text which will focus on unlocking text in a practical way, with an emphasis on directing and acting. Open to actors, directors, designers, playwrights, movement directors, and those interested in theatre-making, the workshop will start with the creation of an ensemble, to the research, the text analysis and how all these lead to a performance.

Christodoros Mnasonos’ workshop, Makam Taksimleri ve Saz Eserleri, will focus on the study of study of words and traditional idioms of the eastern musical tradition of the makam. Through the form of a musical ensemble, the workshop approaches characteristic repertoire of such traditions both theoretically and on a practical level.

Moving on to liberating the voice and expressing the self through singing is Eleni Irakleous and Stelios Chatziktoris’ workshop Free The Voice and Sing Up. Here, participants will deal with the anatomy of the voice, the use of breath and how the analysis of musical text helps to sing without barriers. The programme of the workshop will include warm-ups, singing techniques, as well as musical movement and improvisation games.

Guitarists and bassists can join Ermis Michail’s The Guitarist’s Perspectives Vol. 2. Picking up from where it left off last year, this workshop hopes to inspire guitarists to conceptualise their role in music in a more holistic way. Participants will be guided through demonstrations, hands-on learning and a series of exercises designed to facilitate the exploration of their own personal musical vocabulary.

Inviting both string instrument performers as well as songwriters interested in composing and arranging for strings, Fotis Siotas will conduct a compelling workshop involving these two teams of musicians. The Roles of the Strings in Popular Music workshop will concern itself with the presence of string instruments within a song and will work on themes such as approach, sound-tone and timbre, articulation, harmonisation, and alternative techniques for string instruments.

George Kontrafouris will return for his third year at Fengaros Music Village for another enticing workshop on the world of jazz. Key themes of his Jazz and Beyond Vol. 2 workshop will be improvisation, song analysis, and stylistic idioms, all within their application of performance. The workshop’s goal is to equip attendees with tools to consequently apply both within the realm of jazz as well as in various other musical genres and styles.

For improv and compositions, Martha Mavroudi’s Musical Nuclei will examine how a short musical phrase or rhythmic motif can generate infinite variations while also seek to transfigure an initial inspiration into a fully-fledged composition.

Stephanos Meletiou’s workshop, Grooves, Stickings, Subdivisions and their Musical Applications, will flesh out the musical application of grooves, rhythmic subdivisions and innovative stickings for the modern drummer. Participants will apply these concepts in an organised and open-minded yet analytical manner to fit the demands of today’s musical needs.

The final workshop is taking place for the second time at Fengaros Music Village and is addressed to those interested in music of the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Cypriot dialect and poetry. In Words and Sounds of Cyprus in Contemporary Songwriting, Vassilis Philippou will encourage participants to write poems and compose music, and create original pieces that will be performed by the group.

Fengaros Music Village

Nine workshops taught by industry professionals, part of Fengaros Festival. July 21-26. Kato Drys village, Larnaca. www.fengaros.com/MusicVillage