Corporate Orchestra

What it is

You start from the language of music and work on voice and sound, until a piece gets built together. Making music takes four things: time, rhythm, melody and harmony. The instruments change with the group: percussion, guitar, handmade instruments, choir, and the voice, which is the most important instrument of all. They all sound by being struck, rubbed or shaken, and none of them is designed to be played alone. It holds small groups and groups of several hundred, and those are two different experiences.

From the body to percussion, to build a group

Music is the perfect way to carry a company’s vision and mission to its managers and its people, and to make them feel part of one large mechanism, of a whole that shares the same ideals and works towards the same purpose.

Corporate Orchestra suits every kind of team: small groups or groups of hundreds. The energy runs differently depending on the size, obviously, but in both cases the work reaches deep.

In small groups it becomes much easier to work on listening, on understanding, on complementing each other and on the appetite to take part. With a large orchestra, and we’ve run them with as many as three hundred participants, the emphasis of the experiential training moves onto the sense of belonging, onto the almost unconscious depth of everyone playing the same piece. The day after, everyone knows what happens to the whole thing when one instrument stops.

Corporate Orchestra: a universal language

First the language of music gets introduced, and everyone is given the time to get familiar with it, to shed their shyness and their assumptions. Then comes work on voice and on sound, which lets people experience very strong relational dynamics, both collaborating and individually while still inside a group. Whatever musical metaphor gets used, whether voice, handmade instruments, guitar, percussion, a choir or another model, the work carries on towards creating something unique, a piece of music that comes out of the whole group.

What are the stages the activity moves through? Awareness of your own role; alignment and collaboration inside that role; the motivation of the group; being in tune and integrated across the different functions of the organisation. The ability to collaborate, listening to each other, communication, harmony, the energy it takes to see the project through, attention and the willingness to put yourself in play are the fundamental competences the team develops during the activity. A musical approach is capable of producing a high level of emotional involvement in the people taking part.

A variant of Corporate Orchestra: the Drum Circle

Team spirit and shared values

The people taking part enrich each other in the act of celebrating a community through rhythm and music. People of every level of musical knowledge come together and share their own sense of rhythm with whatever drum or percussion instrument they bring to the event. Anyone who comes and takes part has something to offer the group, and everyone is welcome. The spirit and the magic of rhythm expressed through drums and percussion crosses age, sex, religion, race and culture. Rhythm is a universal language everyone knows, from earliest childhood. The event puts everyone on the same level and brings people closer to each other.

What are the key words of the event? Cooperation and collaboration.

It’s a musical performance created on the spot by everyone taking part, and how good it sounds depends on the relationships, the communication and the alignment inside the group far more than on anybody’s technique. In the Drum Circle version the circle can hold anything from a handful of people to more than a hundred: no hierarchy, no spectators, everyone playing. Since the whole thing is improvised there are no mistakes, and a coordinator holds it together without ever being the soloist.