Crafting Medicine Melodies: Your Voice as an Authentic Channel of Song, Lineage, and Presence

You are the instrument of the song. The song is singing you. 

In this 6 week series, we will learn how to let ourselves be the instrument for the songs that bubble up inside of us, that are asking to be shared – those wordless melodies that can be balms, salve on a dark night (or sunny morning!) of the soul.

In the first part of the series, we will learn how to let a melody “move-in” and make a home in our bodies – setting it to rhythm through careful listening and repetition.

In the second part of the series, we’ll embark on a creative song-crafting process by taking a deep dive into our own cultural heritage - you’ll undo the seams and explore the inner architecture and mechanics of a folk song that speaks to you, and adapt it for your own tongue – your own language, your own body’s way of knowing this song, your own meaning. A reverent container of deep listening, honoring, and reflecting will be waiting for us at the finish -- in which we’ll share the new life we breathed into song.

Essentially, we will be learning about the song traditions of wordless chants, non-lexical songs, and vocables; creating our own medicine melodies and sharing them with each other. Then we'll be reflecting on our ancestry and looking at folk songs from our own cultural lineages and learning how to adapt and translate them for our own voice + style + personal meaning. We'll have lots of chances to sing together, play with instruments, and 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 from many lineages 

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

Goal: Walk away with a song you’ve adapted/translated to sing for yourself and friends around fires, ceremonies, and sacred spaces. Receive and learn techniques for improvising your own medicine melodies to bring you comfort and joy.

Alice Feldman (Alisochka) is co-owner of Resonance Hot Yoga + Massage in Amherst, co-director of JetLAG Festival, and a singer-songwriter who practices offering 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. Apprenticing under her step-father Psoy Korolenko, Alice draws upon over a decade of experience as a cultural event producer, ceremonial musician, and singer-songwriter working primarily at the intersection of Russian, Eastern European, and Jewish folk song.