Singing | Flawn Williams | All Levels | Period 2 | Week 2 (July 14-19, 2024)
Ad Hoc Harmonies offers singing games, tone matching exercises, improvisations, rich chords and percussive patterns. It draws on a wide range of music, from Gregorian chant to doo-wop and beyond. It’s a time for experiment and exploration, where the best question is not, “Was that right?”, but, “Was that interesting?” Participants will sing closely with one another, listen closely to one another, and feel what it’s like to improvise while harmonizing.
We’ll dive into a series of lightly-structured starting points, sometimes using fragments of familiar songs, to explore options for harmonic intervals, pitch matching, and what percussive sounds can bring to vocalizing.
Your contributions to the class can also draw on the traditions, styles, and techniques you’re learning in your other Vocal Week workshops. Some of the harmonies we create will feel simple, satisfying, and utterly predictable, perhaps appropriate for a particular genre; but some may strain the bounds of decency. We’ll get silly with some nonsense songs, wallow in drawn-out chord progressions and drones, or take off on a long group journey that synthesizes in real time a ‘morphing masterpiece of the moment.’
Some notes and phrases will get repeated to approach the threshold of boredom, because often it’s right at that precipice that your creativity will chime in to suggest new possibilities.
About the Instructor
Flawn started out singing early, harmonizing with his parents and older sister around their South Carolina home and on road trips in their ’54 Ford. Other influences included church choirs, novelty records on the jukebox at the local A&W root beer stand, and both the reborn traditional songs and the socially-conscious new songs of the 1960s “Folk Revival.”
He’s led workshops and informal jams at Augusta since 1982 in shape note singing, shanties, vocal improvisation, doo-wop, and other topics from his determinedly-eclectic repertoire. Since 1997, Flawn has coordinated Augusta’s Vocal Week program. He also has performed in many Washington Revels productions in the DC area.
Flawn’s singing credits include harmony vocals on albums by Bryan Bowers, John McCutcheon, Ginny Hawker & Kay Justice, Jennifer Armstrong, Ann Porcella, Pete Kennedy, and others, as well as singing on holiday specials for NPR’s All Things Considered. He also produced Cathy Fink’s solo album ‘The Leading Role,’ and Ginny Hawker & Kay Justice’s duo album ‘Signs and Wonders.’
He wrapped up a decade of teaching music recording and podcasting techniques at Georgetown University in 2019, and continues to produce podcasts for Malcolm Gladwell and other clients.