Video presentation for International Symposium 2018: Music & Metamorphosis

"Singing Pagodas and Pagodinas, Children’s Experiment on Sounds and Storytelling"

Benjamart Maiket, Yanini Pongpakatien and Phattrachattra Thongma

Since its establishment the Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music has involved its students and the children of the neighbouring Bang Yi Khan community to collaborate on several music for society projects. In 2015, together with PGVIM lecturers and students, Bang Yi Khan children created the children opera performance ‘Rossignols en cage’ in celebrations to the Auspicious Occasion of Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn’s 5th Cycle Birthday Anniversary. During one year, selected children from Bang Yi Khan community participated in acting, art and music workshops as well as learning how to compose new lyrics and songs based on the stories of the characters they played.

This process enabled children to make associations between the personal stories they wanted to communicate, establishing dialogues between their real-life experience and the newly created music. Following this initial creation, the children of Bang Yi Khan are now working with PGVIM students, creating new works with the help of music technology. Using classical stories  such as Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) by Maurice Ravel, the children combine their contemporary interpretation of the Empress of the Pagodas and Conversation of Beauty and the Beast, with the art of sounds and storytelling. The students are rewriting the tale of Laideronnette and inventing a new Beast-Prince while matching the story with music samples. This activity has encouraged the students to be involved in the process of creation, as well as exploring their reality through their experiments with music and sounds.