We had another wonderful workshop day at the Royal University of Fine Arts! Mitta Pheab means friendship in the Khmer language and we feel that we have made some new bonds with the music students in Cambodia.

Introducing contemporary music!

We first started the workshop with a basic introduction on contemporary music. The students had many questions for us such as:

How much freedom does contemporary music have?

How do you prepare a contemporary music piece?

How long can a contemporary music piece be?

Each of us showed some modern techniques on our instrument!

Cindy started by showing some cool sounds on her cello.

Sara and Antoine share many similar techniques so they shared some cool single reed and woodwind tricks (flutter tongue, playing without the mouthpiece, slap tongue)!

We composed a piece as a class!

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This was such a fun activity! After showing the techniques on our instrument we invited the students to come to the board and write one measure for our ensemble. We played what each person wrote in real time so that they could hear the piece come together. There was so much creativity and we felt so inspired. For example, in one section of this new piece we have lyrics and also semi-free improvisation. We’re so happy about this new piece which was created by the students at RUFA!

We’ll be sharing this piece tomorrow at our performance at RUFA! We will also be sharing some of the group improvisation that we have been working on, we can’t wait to share the stage with our new friends.

AEKI ensemble