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ManMusicMaker

Come join in for an interactive musical journey of sounds around the world!

  • Participants: up to 150 children aged 5-11 and their parents
  • Duration: as an interactive show 60 minutes, as a continuing educational seminar for instructors or a sounds workshop up to five days
  • Locations: children's theaters, children's museums, schools or at cultural events

An experienced tour guide, Michael Bradke has not only a talking drum, a guitar and a Darabuka in his collection but is also able to show how music all over the world is produced with hands, fingers, cheeks, mouths, heads and feet! 

Our journey leads us from Spain down to Africa, from the North Pole to America and then through the South Pacific. The path we take can be followed on a large globe as travelers learn about and participate in musical games, music and dances from around the world as well as the fifteen different clapping rhythms featured in the "Clapping Stories" segment of the show.

The emphasis of the interactive games - an "entire music-ethnological museum packed into one suitcase" - is not to provide an exhaustive introduction to the respective cultures. Rather, the goal is to use select examples of extant "anthropological constants" from various musics around the world to show the interconnections between music and movement, dance, language, mathematics, expression of feelings and the use of the body as an instrument. These interconnections, which can be found universally, are especially prominent in particular musical cultures, and we will be using an interactive, practice-oriented method to introduce them in this show.

The show comprises a wide variety of activities, including short stories, plenty of opportunities to get involved, original recordings and musical samples and introductions to the various instruments, with a great deal of movement and playing for the children.

Along the way, we will stop at places including:

  • India (music and mathematics)
  • Spain (flamenco clapping / dance)
  • West Africa (isolation dance / music and language)
  • Arktic (playing with sounds from nature)
  • North America (mouth sounds)
  • Tahiti (dancing and stories)

REFERENCES
The "Musical World Tour" has enjoyed more than five hundred successful performances, in venues including the Chicago Children's Museum, Philadelphia Please Touch Museum, Cleveland Children's Museum, Milk International Children's Festival of the Arts in Toronto, Regina International Children's Festival in Canada, Children's Museum of Noyabrsk, Third Annual Museumsbienale in Krasnojarsk, Museum für Musical Culture in Moscow, Samrar, Saratov, Togliatti, Swiss School of Singapore, Museum für Völkerkunde in Stuttgart, Museum für Völkerkunde in Cologne, the international children's museums conference in Berlin (1993) and Lissabon (1999) and at countless continuing education seminars and projects across Germany.Can be performed at children's theaters, children's museums, schools or at cultural events.