Ep1 Crowds and healing - Carole Salmon

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Luke 00:00:02  Hello and welcome to Impro Pod, the podcast that uses piano improvisation to hopefully give an insight into how people perceive the world and how scenes, emotions and ideas can be interpreted musically. Today in the studio we have my ma, Carole Salmon. So if I play your piece of music now. Yeah. And I want you to tell me, what does this make you think of? Okay, okay.

Carole 00:00:59  Okay. So I felt it was like walking into a place which seemed a bit suspicious. There was a bit of an edge to it and then in the next phase it was quite friendly. It was comfortable place. And then at the edge came back again. I couldn't really make up my mind one way or the other, where this was a safe place to be in.

Luke 00:01:20  So the kind of indecisive.

Carole 00:01:22  Well, indecisive, but emotionally. Not sure whether I could be at ease here or whether I really had to look out for something. It was almost as if it was pretending maybe to be a safe place, but there was something lurking, so there's a sort of hesitation there.

Carole 00:01:38  Dee dee dee dee dee. It's like, shall I go forward with this? Or shall I wait and see?

Luke 00:01:43  It's very safe, isn't it? They flat's quite safe. It's like. Oh. And then. Oh, I'm not sure though.

Carole 00:01:56  Yeah. I think that's interesting how just if those three notes have been faster or closer together, wouldn't have had that sense of trepidation. So did you feel that? Yeah. Did you get it when you were playing it? Did any of that cross your mind? How does it come out when you're playing it? Are you thinking any images? It's a.

Luke 00:02:15  Complicated one. I'm thinking about nothing for a lot of it. And then something will come into my mind. But I find it. It's quite helpful to think about nothing because then it flows a bit better. That was just random. Just pluck that out there, and then as I'm playing it, things start to emerge. Okay, so I'm going to give you a word and I want you to tell me a story or set a scene that has something to do with that word.

Luke 00:02:41  And the word is anxious.

Carole 00:02:43  I'm in a crowd of people. I'm walking along quite quickly. I need to get somewhere pretty soon. But then I actually recognize somebody in the crowd who I don't really like very much, and they spot me, and then I try and ignore them, but then they actually start following me. Okay.

Luke 00:03:04  Crowd of people. You spot someone that you don't like and they start following you.

Carole 00:03:09  I try and avoid them and sort of ignore them and then they follow me.

Luke 00:03:13  So you kind of experience some sort of anxiety there and. Yeah. Okay.

Carole 00:03:18  There's lots of people in my way. So I'm having to to work my way through this crowd.

Speaker 3 00:03:22  Okay.

Carole 00:04:19  So yeah, I think it's pretty good actually. What I would say is it wasn't oppressive enough in terms of the crowd of people, because I'm claustrophobic. Going through a crowd of people is actually quite a heavy thing for me to do. So I would have made that a little bit heavier. Maybe not such light notes, maybe kind of slightly more mellow or darker notes.

Carole 00:04:37  Heavier notes. I think there might have been a moment when bomb, when I recognized this person, that might have been more of an emphasis, a point in the music, maybe followed by a silence. I'm actually figuring out that I know this person. Then I actually don't like this person, and now I want to get away from this person.

Luke 00:04:54  That moment of realization. Yeah. I mean, with the crowd wise, I was going for, just busyness rather than fear, I guess, because I don't experience crowds like you do.

Carole 00:05:04  I just said I'm a claustrophobic person. Go.

Luke 00:05:07  You're not a festival. Go. Are you know, you're not really into crowds. But also I was just going for the contrast in, you know, if you start dark and sinister, then it can only go a certain way.

Carole 00:05:16  And I think that worked well. I think it was just a bit too light or it was too, too frivolous for me because that's the crowd. But then there definitely needs to be a point in it, whether it's a kind of stopping point and a recognition and then a something else.

Carole 00:05:31  So it's almost like that divides the emotion between, okay, I'm just getting through this crowd and oh, shit. Who's that? They don't like that person. Now I'm trying to get through this crowd in a bigger hurry.

Luke 00:05:41  Okay, so I tried again.

Carole 00:06:58  Yeah, I thought that worked very well. When I closed my eyes again and actually went through that sequence, I thought it worked much better the second time. It was much more of a kind of depth, sort of lower notes to start with. And then the point of seeing the person and recognizing the person then deciding that that's not somebody I want to be around, and then taking off and getting through the crowds feeling like being chased slightly, like those old movies like Buster Keaton or something. But it got a bit jazzy too, didn't it? Which I thought was good. Yeah, it'd be really interesting to film that sequence now, see whether the music works.

Luke 00:07:32  In that film. Now you see me. Something like that. It's like that kind of classic chase stuff, you know, and especially the sort of rhythmic kind of dum dum dum dum and then the kind of discordant thing going on.

Carole 00:07:58  That could almost be the heartbeat, isn't it, as well? As you get more and more kind of nervous or frightened about, the heartbeat can get faster. Yeah.

Luke 00:08:08  So you try another scene, then something of contrast.

Carole 00:08:11  Oh, no, I didn't need to think about this, so I need a bit of time.

Luke 00:08:17  So I'll give you a word. You make up a story around that word, and then you give it back to me as a story. Yeah. So the word is sadness.

Carole 00:08:28  Okay. Immediately what came to mind was that story I told you that happened in Paignton the other day about standing, watching the sea with Bob, and these roses came up on the shore. They're real roses. White roses. And I was asking myself, what do you think those roses are about? And as I was standing there, a guy came up to me and said, what do you think those white roses are for? And I said, it might be something to do with a commemoration or scattering of ashes.

Carole 00:08:58  And then he said, 40 years ago I lost my friend on this day, at this particular point on the beach, there was a storm and we were 17, and we decided to go and see the storm. We went down onto the beach, and then this wave came all the way around the wall, because it's around a wall and washed us both away And he said, I managed to survive. And then he pointed out where he managed to cling on to. But his friend was washed away. And every year for the last 40 years, he's been going to that spot that day to remember his friend and bring flowers to his grave. So it was it was very sad. And he said, what do you think? And he said, to begin with, what do you think those roses are for? He told me his story, and I said, maybe that's the way that your friend is saying hello to you on this day, because they're always with us. They never leave us, and they have ways of giving us messages.

Carole 00:09:56  And he loved that. So it was kind of sad and special and magical and heartfelt, but almost joyful as well. And he said to me, we'd had a wonderful day together. A very sad ending to that day.

Luke 00:11:39  I didn't want to go into the whole kind of dramatic scene of him losing his friend like the memory, like he's he's looking at the roses or something. And you start off with just seeing some roses, and then that gathers meaning as the story goes on, something reflective.

Carole 00:11:53  That's what I got from what you've just played. And sadness and some beauty. You know, there's beauty there as well. And the fact that he comes every year on that day, I.

Luke 00:12:04  Wanted to end it on that kind of positive note. You know, as in, it's still he's remembered.

Carole 00:12:12  It would be interesting to hear a little bit of an insight into how you work. If there's an idea, say, there's the story that I'm telling you. What do you do with that?

Luke 00:12:23  I think he could have musical intuition.

Luke 00:12:25  You have, like, a load of presets. This is a sad collection of notes. Or maybe this is a kind of triumphant. And those presets kick in, and then it's just a matter of working out whether it works or not.

Carole 00:12:40  So it's a vocabulary of but also how how does it work with the feedback from me?

Luke 00:12:45  Yeah. And that reinforces all. When you say something doesn't work, you kind of reevaluate it, you know, which is the interesting bit.

Carole 00:12:53  So this is a two way process. It's not just you improvising something because there's two people thinking about it or generating ideas and then you playing it, and then there's the sort of feedback and then you're playing it again. It's a process in itself isn't it?

Luke 00:13:06  Yeah. And that's helpful. I think even when you're working with film or something, that's always the process, isn't it? Well, thanks very much for your input.

Carole 00:13:15  I've enjoyed it. I think it's very exciting.

Luke 00:13:18  Join us next time for another episode of Impro Pod.

Luke 00:13:21  Thanks for listening.