Workshop – Voices as Harmony: Music as Language
December 5 @ 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm MST
WORKSHOP
VOICES AS HARMONY
Saturday, December 5th | 1:00pm – 4:00pm
$45
Music is a language you already speak—even if you’ve never played an instrument or sung a note. Join us at Surel’s Place with Artist-in-Residence Kara Yannon for an immersive, deeply interactive 3-hour workshop that flips traditional music education on its head. Forget rigid lectures and complex music theory; here, we feel the music first and understand it second.
Why Attend This Workshop?
- Zero experience required: This space is built for everyone, from absolute beginners to seasoned creatives. (12 and up)
- Interactive & participatory: You won’t just sit and listen. You will move, chant, reflect, and create.
- Community-centered: Connect with neighbors through shared sound, storytelling, and spontaneous collaboration.
- Real-time creation: Watch and participate as a live musical composition emerges directly from the voices in the room.
What We Will Explore Together
- Part 1: Immersion
Dive straight into the music. Wrapped in a soothing drone foundation, we will explore modal tonal environments through gentle movement, chanting, humming, and call-and-response. - Part 2: Reflection
Translate sound into emotion and imagery. We’ll capture our experiences by answering intuitive prompts and sharing stories with our neighbors. - Part 3: Musical Conversation
Watch your spoken reflections turn into song. We will layer our written words rhythmically over a drone, creating complex, beautiful group harmonies in real time. - Part 4: Translation & Affirmation
We will close by looking at the themes we built together. You will leave with a deep affirmation that music is a universal language rooted in human connection.
Partial scholarships available by request to info@surelsplace.org.
BIOGRAPHY
Kara Yannon (MO) is a songwriter and music teacher from the Midwest whose artistic voice has grown at the intersection of composition and education. For her, sound-making has always been a playground. Growing up, she was constantly singing and humming, trying things, getting them wrong, and crafting sounds outside the box just to see if they would fit. Mentors along the way fostered that spontaneous creation, and her brain that’s always in motion found its footing through playing with sound. Writing songs began as a personal practice, a way of shaping feeling into melody, but teaching reshaped how she understood music entirely.
As a choir director in an independent school, she spends her days watching young people encounter harmony for the first time. Again and again, she has seen that the most transformative moments happen not when students are analyzing music, but when they are immersed in it: listening, imitating, and responding instinctively. It is the same way she first learned to sing, through immersion and experimentation by ear, and discovering that there was a name and a framework for it opened up her whole world.
That realization led her to study Gordon’s Music Learning Theory and to rethink both her teaching and her songwriting. She began to approach music as a language learned through immersion and exchange rather than correction and performance. Like any language, it starts with babbling, and that experimentation is the path forward. Her compositional process shifted accordingly: many of her pieces now grow from spontaneous vocal exploration, communal humming, and spoken rhythm, later shaped into structured songs.
Kara is especially interested in collaboration, including intergenerational spaces, but her central focus is inviting those who do not consider themselves musical to enter composition through shared creation. She wants people to feel what she felt in choir: that alone we are powerful, but in harmony and collaboration, we are unstoppable. Her work continues to evolve from this belief: that music belongs to everyone, and that fluency begins with listening together.”
This project is supported in part by a grant from the City of Boise’s Department of Arts & History.
