Project
Songwriting as a people-to-people endeavor
Aim:
To strengthen sustainable connection between people, and between people and planet, through songwriting that engages with issues of social and environmental insecurity, broadly speaking.
Background:
The philosophy underpinning the SOI Declaration is that we are dependent on each other, on nature and on our shared planetary wonder.
Our goal is to further creative collaboration through songwriting to tell stories of our contemporary moment and further interconnection, dialogue, and peaceful co-existence towards greater social, environmental, and cultural sustainability.
The project is inspired by results of the arts-based PhD project “Songs in the Key of Collaboration: Engaging with Anthropocene moments through personal and collaborative songwriting” undertaken by researcher and songwriter Martin Høybye (Høybye 2023, 2024). The study showed that songwriting can offer analysis-in-the-making-moment of a given situation. An analysis which is conveyed in sung form.
The research also developed frameworks for writing songs with others. An approach which includes incorporating words from a give-and-take-conversation before the songwriting – as well as using a melody game as a starting point for composing a song’s melody.
Songwriting with creative constraints:
With songwriting processes at its core, SOI projects aim to promote understanding and peaceful coexistence between people, to further sustainable human-nature relationships, and heighten awareness of human impact on nature and planet.
Collaborative songwriters/facilitators go out into the world and write with people who are not already musicians or songwriters. The songwriting addresses these people’s experiences of going through, for example, climate and biodiversity crises, or living with social and environmental insecurity, broadly speaking.
Co-writing a song with someone you have no prior knowledge of is a constraint in itself. The SOI Declaration encourages songwriters/facilitators to seek ways to collaborate in which their practice is brought into play in new ways, and thereby is being developed while also being shared.
In SOI projects there are full artistic freedom. However, we hold SOI facilitators to three core steps. We hope that facilitators can find inspiration in these, or from this outset develop their own approach that similarly tries to even out the difference between “expert” and “novice.” So that the co-writer is invited as fully into the songwriting process as possible.
The three steps are (see also the appendix).
A) The songwriting session starts with a give-and-take conversation, which serves as a basis for the song’s theme and lyrics.
B) A melody game must be part of the composition phase, by which the songwriting participant (co-writer) co-creates the melodic direction with the facilitator.
C) The songs must be completed on site, to the extent that they can be sung as a first draft, and the participant can receive a first mp3 file of what has been created. The songs can later be modified, edited.
Previous SOI projects and experience:
The first album of songs written in accordance with the SOI Declaration was released in 2024:
“Songs in the Key of Collaboration”: https://hoybye.lnk.to/songs
Experiences are related here: https://thenewsongrise.com/activities/