Crafting Medicine Melodies: A Six-Session Series

Join this Workshop Series to learn about wordless chants (vocables) and song traditions.

We will each create our own medicine melodies and share them with each other.

We will also learn techniques for improvising our own medicine melodies!

Then we'll reflect on our ancestries and look at folk songs from our own cultural lineages. We'll learn how to adapt and translate them for our own voice, style, and personal meaning.

We'll have lots of chances to sing together, play with instruments, create, and bring life to song.

We’ll explore:

- Channeling melodies, wordless vocables, and cultural traditions that carry these forms (primarily investigating Jewish niggun)

- Adapting songs that call to you to your voice, your style

- Folk songs and multilingual songs (techniques for translating and adapting)

- Simple melodies and percussive accompaniments - for your voice, your style

You'll walk away with a song you’ve adapted and translated to sing for yourself and friends around fires, ceremonies, and sacred spaces.

It will be helpful to bring the following to each session (if you have them available):

Rattles, shakers, drums, and/or percussive music-makers.

A notebook and pen. A thermos/mug for tea.

Alice Feldman (Alisochka) is co-owner of Resonance Hot Yoga + Massage in Amherst, co-director of JetLAG Festival, and a singer-songwriter who offers music as medicine. She channels songs with deep spiritual meaning from traditions around the world and transmits them in English and Russian (her native languages) as well as many others. Her style is to create transadaptations (to borrow the term from the inimitable Daniel Kahn) of songs that heal our hearts and lift our souls, what some call medicine songs. She shares her original songs acapella, or often accompanied by shruthi box, drums, kashakas, and other strange and magical traditional instruments.

Alice draws upon 10+ years of experience as a cultural event producer, ceremonial musician, and as a singer-songwriter working with songs and translations, plus 10+ years as an apprentice working with Russian, Eastern European, and Jewish folk song alongside my step-father Psoy Korolenko, a Grammy-nominated multilingual singer-songwriter who I hope will join us a guest instructor for 1 or more sessions.