Join Our Groove

INSTRUCTIONS: Let’s put leadership into action and bring to life the core value of leading through positive action. We want to spark a Music for All Leadership Lesson in real-time that’s organic, grass-roots, everywhere, and anywhere. Inspired in part by the musical collaboration of a hip-hop cypher (or what sometimes can be referred to as “posse cuts” or “posse tracks”) here’s the idea:

We want to combine a rap-world mashup/remix musical expression with something like a dance challenge on TikTok. Or even Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, Quadio, wherever the music might take you! Our intent is to set in motion a creative remix-challenge that can engage everyone and anyone in the music-making/dance/color guard/cheer/performing arts ecosystem. If you make music, mix music, move to or dance to music, we want you to…

• Join our groove
• Add your rhythm
• Add your notes
• Add your moves
• Because #music matters

Bottom line, we are freely sharing a series of grooves at 144 BPM that will enable anyone to add their rhythm, their notes, their mix, their moves, their dancing. Musically and choreographically we want to inspire sharable moments in person, on video, and online. Illustrating the positively life-changing and empowering experience creating, providing, expanding, sharing, and demonstrating that music for all can be more than just an organization’s name.

By making these grooves publicly available on the musicforall.org web site, anyone can download, perform with, record using, dance to, choreograph to, video edit with, mash them up, and mix them up anyway anyhow they want. In any musical style or genre you want!

In addition, Susie Harloff and her fantastically-talented Summer Symposium faculty are creating 15-second TikTok dance, flag, rifle, and sabre routines. The goal is to simply encourage anyone to share, learn, and perform these 15-second segments and post their own video—playing along to, dancing to, spinning to, singing to, improvising on top of, even video editing using these grooves.

For someone who wants to create something longer (say a one-minute video) you could do all four choreographed routines (dance, flag, rifle, sabre) and edit them together. Musicians can cut-and-paste the grooves into their favorite software on a computer, phone, or DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) adding their own talents to the mix to share away.

Leadership is sometimes an individual telling others what to do. Leadership is always setting an example for others to follow, collaborating together, adding to, improving upon, and bringing to life something better for everyone involved. As Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby explained during his TED Talk, that’s how leadership creates a movement. So, the more people who build on this the better! Let’s create an excuse to “add your talents to the mix”—which BTW is a fantastic lesson on teambuilding. Given the technology, anyone with a video-recording mobile phone can be a part of this challenge to prove #musicmatters.

No Copyright Hassles For You To Join Our Groove! You are free to share, copy and redistribute these tracks in any medium or format anywhere and everywhere. We hope you’ll adapt, remix, transform, and build upon these initial grooves for any purpose, even commercially! To offer the most freedom, we’re releasing these initial tracks under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License. That way more people can build upon and share freely. Love to have you include #joinourgroove #musicmatters in addition to your own!