Body percussion in vocal contexts

In March 2020, just weeks before the first lockdown of the COVID pandemic, I released a body-percussion tutorial, Body Beats, covering many ideas I've developed in workshops. Much of this includes material based on literacy as a stimulus for body-percussion composition – an approach developed through collaborations with literacy authority Pie Corbett of Talk4Writing. In early years settings, this involved taking children's names, nursery rhymes or books and exploring the rhythmic potential of words when spoken out.

Having worked with standalone body percussion, I was intrigued by the possibilities (and challenges) of body percussion in vocal contexts – after all, it's all just ‘body music’ (a term I'd heard used by Keith Terry of the US arts organisation Crosspulse). An opportunity to explore this came during a collaboration with the choral-composer team of Alexander L'Estrange and Joanna Forbes L'Estrange. The project, Green Love, combined body percussion and voices for a virtual performance. In this instance, the body percussion came first, with Alexander and Jo basing sections of the work on grooves I'd composed. One of these was an adaptation of a west-African djembe pattern, using stomps, chests, clicks and claps representing bass, slap and open tones: