This summer...
School Of Cobra 2008
Part of the Terrible Noises for Beauiful People Series

Make sounds with other people!
Learn John Zorn’s Cobra!
No experience necessary.

Interested? Write back .

This summer, I will be teaching a weekly series of classes doing vocal improvisation, based around learning John Zorn’s excellent game-composition Cobra. I taught a version of this class last spring. And fans of my old Room 101 Games series may remember that this game was presented a couple of times as part of Open Cobra, the vocal improv event I did with Joe Sorbara.

I’m interested in improvised music, not so much as a mode of performance, but as something for people to do together. Musicians are more than welcome to take these classes, and many do. But most of the people who take these classes don’t have any musical experience. You don’t have to have done anything like this before; you just have to want to.

Cobra is a really wonderful, complicated noise-improv game composed by John Zorn. It has a well-earned reputation for being complex, mysterious, and hard to listen to. The piece had a heyday in the downtown New York and Tokyo experimental music scenes in the 80’s, and continues to be played around the world. You can read about it here, here, and here, and see a video of it here.

The class will be entirely vocal- no instruments, just voice. Part of the class will be spent working on general vocal-noise-improv, some working specifically on learning Cobra.

I’m still finalizing the details of time (hope to start in the next few weeks), schedule (probably 8 consecutive Wednesdays, Tuesdays or Thursday, something like that), price, and location.

Rose Bianchini made a short video about last year’s Cobra class, which you can see here. You can read about a related Cobra project here. A bit more information will be posted at http://www.schooloflearning.org/cobra_08.html .

If you might be interested in taking part, email me at improvise@mglouberman.com, and I’ll keep you posted about details. Thanks!

(And, of course, please feel free to circulate/repost this announcement anywhere you like.)

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