The Online Improvisation Orchestra was set up by composer and musician Suzie Shrubb in March 2020.

How it works:

We meet online using Zoom on a weekly basis for 1 and a 1/2 hours to improvise together. We use this time explore and utilise the unique creative possibilities that an online space can provide for music making. Anyone from any kind of training or none is welcome to come into the space and any instrument or sound/vibration making devices including voice are also welcome into the space. We are an international community and English is the primary language spoken in the space. Membership is shifting and changes from session to session depending on who is available and comes. The space is designed to be held in a way that incorporates and expresses this shifting body from session to session. We work with who is there.

Come as you are and if you feel moved to bring any materials to work with for example: paper, maps, books, images, stories or fairy tales, found sounds, dreams, ideas, text or words etc please do so. Know that this is an invitation and that there is no requirement to bring anything. However you’d like to be in the space you are welcome. We’ll be following whatever happens in the moment and anything we’ve bought with us. 

Although anyone is welcome into the space, the space is held and boundaried – for instance I do not put the link into the world or on social media. And there are boundaries (below) for how this space is held. If you wish to come along please contact me at suzieshrubb@hotmail.com.

A Statement of Boundary: in place for now but ongoing. 

The balance of this group being open to all and closed enough so that we can do the work that we do of following intuition and not knowing in the space is an ongoing work of enquiry. I find the following boundaries enable me to facilitate that space.  

1. Members are free to introduce this group and me to anyone they think will be interested in joining. If you know anyone who you think would be interested in joining, then I’d love to offer the space to them.  Introduce them to me via email and then I can pick it up from there.  
2. In order to maintain the integrity of the space I want to ask that no one shares the Zoom link with people outside this group without my consent. As above put anyone in touch with me and I can share the link.  

In order to hold this space, I do need to have at least said “hi” and found out a little bit about what that person is curious about and also to explain a bit about what we’re doing and how the space is held. This is so people can choose to come into the space with an awareness of what it might be, even if ultimately, we don’t know what will happen once we are in the space. 

If anyone has any questions or comments please get in touch. Thank you.  And especially to those of you who read and honour this. It means so much to me that you do this. 

Although the space is open, for me, there are questions also about what this means. The space is held, but we are also responsible for ourselves in the space. The space is open to those who have the technology to be able to access an online environment and so is not fully open to everyone. It may be enormously challenging for a range of neurodiverse expressions for instance. People with more or less training may feel differently about their comfort levels in the space or even their ability to be in this space. One of the reasons I set up this space is to grapple with, meet, witness, hold and express these things. Who is in the space and what we are all bringing to the space is the holding form or the score of our music.

Rather than “free” improvisation or “non-idiomatic improvisation”, both of which are terms that might apply here, I also like to think that this type of music making is relational improvisation since the huge diversity of the way relationships between are expressed in such a space not only is the music, but also forms the place from where the music emerges.

A new definition of this type of music could be “relational improvisation.”

As a composer I am interested in composing spaces that enable a music of the community in that space to emerge and be expressed. And this group is one such composition.

I firmly believe that music making and creative spaces should be freely available to all people and as such this group is run completely free of charge to all participants and I receive no financial gain from holding it. This does impact on the accessibility of the space and this is something I am currently focussing on addressing. How do we as a community provide free spaces and maintain access for all? It’s a tricky question for my wider society in the UK and Western democracies that has arisen from the holding of this space.

And yet the creative possibilities of online working and the access in other ways that online working brings are extraordinary. It enables an international community to be formed on a weekly basis without the logistical and environmental challenge of travel. Among other things, it enables people to come together from different modalities, experiences and heritages to create music together, it enables an immediate access to complex and rich forms of music that would otherwise take months to rehearse and only be accessible to those with years of training. The type of space that online music making offers brings novel forms of music and creates a new vibrational space, which is largely marginalised and ignored by the wider music world and yet from which music can nonetheless emerge. Improvisational forms of music making really come into their own in this type of space as we can employ a dynamic way of working to discover how to work in this different type of vibrational space, or this type of room.

I am available for mentorship, coaching and facilitating online music making, whether that’s rehearsing for a specific project or support with developing a project or piece or holding creative music making. Please get in touch at suzieshrubb@hotmail.com.