Peter    Benjamin

Peter Benjamin Music Workshop

& Creative Services

 

Peter Benjamin's Music Workshop and Creative Services is not just a music education platform, it's a partnership with musicians, individuals, and communities intended to bring together our disparate lives into a greater network of art, creativity, and connection. It's an ongoing project to help people re-envision and reconstruct their lives within a hyper-economic world.

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"Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes."                                                            

 

"... we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of "making a living;" such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly. The only exception society is willing to grant is to the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only "worker" left in a laboring society."                                                             

                                                                                             - Hannah Arendt

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We act in the world through both our work and our labor. Today we understand a large part of our identity through our work, that is, what we do to make money. However, for most of history, our identities have been principally defined through our labor, that is, what we do in order to maintain our lives. Though work is important, I argue that we've put too heavy an emphasis on it as a signifier of our place within society. I want to reassert the importance of repositioning our labor- the things we do for our health and home- as much more fundamental to our lives than our work. I also want to insist that learning and creativity are essential to this reorienting of the relationship between our labor and our work.

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Consider this hypothetical example: A highly specialized engineer or tech worker today can make an impressive wage with his/her skill set. However, this skill set may not be optimal for maintaining a good diet, being conscientious about exercise, or making and maintaining a personal space that is beautiful, inviting, and a capacious space for a creative and reinvigorating home life. Our hyper-technological and specialized economy tends to favor and reward our work at the expense of our labor.

 

I believe we must focus first on our labor in order to balance and strengthen our lives in the workplace. To the extent we attend to our health, diet, and home, we directly affect our work for the better. The inevitable outcome of this strengthening of the individual through his/her labor and has the potential for a series of cascading benefits for society as a whole. Simply put, while not everyone will have access to a high paying job, everyone needs their labor to produce healthful and beneficial outcomes for themselves and others!

 

This re-balancing of labor and work is integral to the overall mission of The Peter Benjamin Music Workshop and related creative services....

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Instruction and consultation is available for students, adults, professional and amateur performers, podcasters, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, and people of all walks of life who seek to improve their lives through their creative work and essential labor.

 

Email Peter at peterbenjaminmusic@gmail.com to enroll as a patron of the PBMWCS.

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"If you want to help the world, teach people how to live in it..."

                                                                                                  

                                                                                                           - Joseph Campbell

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Music Education- Philosophy and Methodology

 

Music is a language of meaning that our brains create through interaction with sound. My approach to teaching music, therefore, understands and emphasizes the way in which we learn language. All children develop language skills first by becoming fluent (the ability to understand and speak a language), and then becoming literate (the ability to read and write).

 

You can see how, though the perception of music is something the brain does, the production of sound is something that our bodies must do! Therefore, becoming fluent in music is an embodied process- the same way we learn to throw a ball, ride a bike, or even walk for the first time. Many of us who’ve learned to play an instrument can attest to how awkward and unnatural it can feel to play even a basic chord or scale on the piano or guitar, for example. After time though, these novel ways of using our bodies become as natural as the use of a casual or even unconscious gesture to express ourselves. We must first learn to play music as something that our bodies do, rather than something that our brains understand conceptually.

 

The fundamental grammar of music used for communication and expression is represented by distinct elements such as rhythm, harmony, and melody. Our goal is to develop mastery both within these distinct realms of music and in how they combine to form the music that we want to play.

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- Peter B. December, 2019

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Programs

 

The PBMWCS features the following areas of focus. Of course, there is considerable overlap in terms of the format and content between each series, so you can think of them as slightly different styles or contexts in which to learn.

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Master Class

Advanced concepts and practicum for

developing/performing musicians

 

For the musicians who have successfully developed a degree of embodied musical fluency, I offer a comprehensive set of tools with which to conceptualize the language and performance of music. We will explore the concept of tonality and tonal language as guiding principles with which to understand and master harmonic and melodic dimensions of music. We will also develop our rhythmic fluency and literacy as part of our embodied and conceptual knowledge base as we explore the idiomatic landscape of various musical styles. Particular emphasis on composition, arrangement, improvisation, and recording technology will be used to focus our skills in this advanced track. Master class forums will be held for artists in this series featuring sets of music (several songs instead of just one) and opportunities to perform their music with established area musicians.

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$40 - 30 minute session

$50 - 45 minutes session

$70 - 1 hour session

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Songwriter/Media Development

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Over the past several years, I have had the privilege of working with many incredibly talented young aspiring songwriters and performers who are well positioned to bring their artistry and unique musical voices to the world. For these young artists, one of the most important skills they will need to be competitive in today's music industry is the ability to self-produce their own music. Self-production is an essential tool not only in expressing your music in its final audio form, but also for aiding in the creative process of composition and songwriting. The principle goal of this series of transform initial song ideas into fully realized songwriter demos, which are one of the essential currencies of aspiring professional songwriters.

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Artists also have access media development services aimed at increasing the exposure and availability of their music to the digital media space- the arena in which music is now primarily experienced. This service will get artists' music registered with a Performance Rights Organization (PRO, like ASCAP or BMI), which ensures that songwriters get paid when their music is heard. The media service also helps with getting artist music on streaming platforms for maximum digital presence.

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$40 - 30 minute session

$50 - 45 minutes session

$70 - 1 hour session

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Atypical and Neurodivergent

 

I have had a significant degree of experience over the past 5 & 1/2 years interacting with students on the autism spectrum, as well as those presenting a range of other atypical/neurodivergent learning patterns such as ADHD, dyscalculia (difficulty with symbols, including music notation!), and dysgraphia (difficulty with transcribing material into written format). You can begin to see how the traditional approach to learning music which is characterized by the already difficult process of reading or interpreting highly graphical notation and then ‘mapping’ the visual field onto the the body (fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, hips, legs, feet, etc.) might represent a major challenge to some kinds of learners.

 

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Despite some of the difficulties that often arise, I continue to see profound levels of creative potential with atypical students that I hope to help unlock. To do this, I often keep open the option to explore music learning and creativity through dialogue and conversation through a process I call 'creative dialectic.' Creative dialectic offers a way of understanding the creative process through a much broader range of ideas and concepts such as games, athletics, language, philosophy, psychology, history, and other areas of artistic pursuit (visual art, design, etc.). This process is actually similar to and inspired by my time studying composition at the college level with renown composer Gregory Youtz.

 

Believe it or not, students who experience difficulty with the process of learning to embody music making are often extremely good at thinking about creativity, problem solving, deep learning, and their own subjective aesthetic experience on a more intellectual level. It's my personal believe that world can benefit profoundly from their perspective! Many of these conversations will be available on the Creative Dialectic podcast available exclusively on this site.

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Participation in this track also avails you to the symposiums that will take place in various formats at least once or twice a year in a handful of rotating venues throughout the greater Seattle, Tacoma, and Eastside areas.

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$40 - 30 minute session

$50 - 45 minutes session

$70 - 1 hour session

 

 

Ensemble Workshops and Practicum

Group instruction/coaching for

bands and church worship teams

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My experience in producing, collaborating, consulting, and coaching a range of amateur as well as professional ensembles, bands, church worship teams and artists has given me a unique insight into what makes a functional musical relationship between people. In addition to musical and technical considerations, this program gives groups the opportunity to better understand the proper tools for communicating and verbalizing musical ideas. This track in particular emphasizes arrangement, part playing/development, and live recording as essential skills for ensemble players.

 

$60 - 1 hour session/consultation

$100 - 2 hour session/consultation

$150 - 3 hour session/consultation

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