This Is A Voice
This Is A Voice
Jazz, Research & Bucket-List Turns: The Moment Melissa Forbes Quit Law for Music
Dr Melissa Forbes worked in law for 10 years until the firm's partner told a story about a bucket of water. That speech sent her straight to a jazz conservatorium, then to the research lab, and finally into community halls where group singing is healing real-world isolation.
In this episode of This Is A Voice, Jeremy Fisher & Dr Gillyanne Kayes chat with Melissa on
- the “flight-corrections” that reboot a creative life
- how positive psychology reframes practice, strength and burnout
- why participatory choirs can out-perform stadium shows in human impact
- tips for choir leaders & voice teachers who feel stuck in the “performance-only” loop
Whether you belt for Britain, lead chamber choirs, or run a voice studio, the twists and turns in Melissa’s story will spark new ideas for you and your singers.
Hit play, grab a cuppa, and let’s get vocal about making music that matters!
00:00 – A Jazz Singer, A Lawyer & A Bucket of Water Walk Into a Bar...
05:05 – Bringing the lawyer brain to music
08:50 – Is singing research a dry subject?
13:55 – Losing (& refinding) your joy in music
17:45 – Turning points for different people
22:09 – How singing helps with a crisis of social health
24:12 – Music for health and wellbeing
#CommunityChoir #PositivePsychology #VoiceScience
Remember to like, subscribe, and hit the bell icon for more insightful episodes. Leave a comment below on what inspired you the most! 👇
Here's the link to Melissa's article on pivoting from music performance to music on prescription (it's free to access):
https://research.usq.edu.au/download/58f90447e97bc759d586fcb70ab91a7d3114d02bd6fdade8d31dbc0b1e02b81f/449105/forbes-et-al-2025-from-music-performance-to-prescription-a-guide-for-musicians-and-health-professionals.pdf
You can find out about our Teacher Accreditation for singing teachers, vocal coaches and choir leaders and start your own journey here
https://vocalprocess.co.uk/teacher-accreditation/
We've also got this ↓
For the best self-guided learning, check out the Vocal Process Learning Lounge - 22 years of vocal coaching resources (now over 700 videos) for less than the price of one private singing lesson with us.
Click on the link https://vocalprocess.co.uk/learning-lounge/learning-lounge-level-2-deep-dive/
If you want to discover if our singing teacher training programme works for YOU, message us - we can share the process for joining Cohort26. https://www.cognitoforms.com/VocalProcess1/TheAccreditationProgramme
Get the One Minute Voice Warmup app here, it's got a 4.9star rating
Appstore https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/one-minute-voice-warmup/id1212802251
Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.speechtools.warmup&hl=en_GB
Check out our Voice Journal, written with Rayvox's Oren Boder https://www.rayvox.co.uk/products/voice-journal?ref=VOCALPROCESS
Find us - follow us on the socials!
📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vocalprocess
📖 Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/vocalprocess
#vocalprocess #teacheraccreditation #voicetraining
Jeremy Gillyanne: This is a voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. This Is A Voice.
Hello and welcome to This Is A Voice, season 11, episode 12, the podcast where we get Vocal about voice. I'm Jeremy Fisher. And I'm Dr. Gillyanne Kayes, the first thing I'm gonna do is apologize for my voice because I don't normally speak at this octave.
This is because I have a cold. Hello and welcome. Now Gillyanne, you are introducing today. Yes, I would like to say welcome to Dr. Melissa Forbes, who is associate professor of contemporary singing in the music department at the University of South Queensland. Her byline is Make Music That Matters, which I think is wonderful.
Love it. She is the author of the new podcast Leading Notes, and she's also the author of a book that is coming up very soon called Making Music That Matters. Melissa, welcome to the podcast. Welcome. Oh.
melissa forbes: Oh, I'm so excited to be here. It's like meeting old friends.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Okay. Where are we starting? I'd just like to tell the listeners that one of the reasons why we particularly asked Melissa was that Melissa kindly asked me to perhaps say a few words about her forthcoming book Making Music That Matters, which meant, of course, I had to read the entire book, what a pleasurable task.
And there were so many things in this book that absolutely resonated with what we're finding now in the singing community, particularly as I think we are perhaps leaders in the field in training teachers and also choir leaders. I felt it was really important for us to have Melissa and talk about the content of the book and how she got to be where she is right now.
So how did you, where did you start? Yeah. Where did you start? What's your core interest now and what flight corrections went on route?
melissa forbes: Do you want the full story or the edited version?
Jeremy Gillyanne: We'll do the quick full story. Yeah.
melissa forbes: story. Look, I started out when I was a young adult working in commercial law, so I studied arts law at university,
Jeremy Gillyanne: wow.
melissa forbes: I loved my English Literature so I did that as a treat on the side while I studied law, which I found insufferably boring. But at the end of my degrees, I thought I had no other choice. This was like the mid nineties.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: We were nowhere near as enlightened as as we're now around, you know,
career ,vision and strategy and all that kind of stuff. So anyway, it was all a bit thoughtless on my part. It soon became apparent when I started working that it wasn't going to be a long term thing for me. It did end up being seven and a half years. But there was a, there was a turning point where one night we had our law firm, we had this black tie dinner ostensibly to thank everybody for their hard work. And the managing partner gets up and says look, it's been a very good year everybody. Thanks, thanks for your contributions, but um, never forget this.
If I have a bucket of water and I put your hand in that bucket and take it out, it's basically like it was never in there in the first place.
And it was this really weird way of saying that all of us replaceable.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Wow.
melissa forbes: And we were all kind of shocked because on one hand he's kind of right, but on the
other hand, who wants to work in a place like that where that's how you are seen as just literally a cog in a machine. And that was one of the moments where I thought, I can't do this for 50 years. I
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: I was part of the staff band that would always perform at the Christmas parties, you know,, and that was my kind of outlet and everybody would always say, oh, you are so good at this. And I'm like, yeah, I really should do something about this singing slash music thing. And so so I, to my managing partner at the time and said, look, I think I'm gonna go back and study music at the Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane. they said, great, do it. We'll give you a part-time job. We'll support you in whatever you wanna do. So it was a pretty enlightened place to work for a law firm. But anyway, that was that was one of the flight corrections, definitely.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm. Neat.
melissa forbes: Kind of taking that plunge and, setting what had been almost 10 years of study and work to
to go and do something, which was, thought of as quite precarious and still is probably even more so than it was then. But so that, that was the first first big turning point for me of my journey towards finding a place for myself and music. And I think that's what my whole life has really been about. It's music so much and I want to know where my place is in it.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Melissa, can I ask you a question because mm-hmm. I'm always so fascinated by the history that people bring with them into the music industry, and you have such a clear, different history. Have you found that any of your lawyer brain has come in to the way that you work with music?
melissa forbes: I think that it has set me up with some really great transferable skills, actually.
Jeremy Gillyanne: yeah.
melissa forbes: particularly now that I'm working in the research space and in higher education. In terms of higher education, reading policies I've had to write policies and procedures, all that kind of stuff. I find very, not easy, but I understand how that stuff works.
Jeremy Gillyanne: I'm guessing, as you are now supervising people doing their PhDs amongst other things that that analytical side of your brain, the ability to filter, to categorize, to organize and also to assess what other people say about the research, it must be that that sort of solicitor part of your brain is being transferred across there really usefully. What do you think?
melissa forbes: Yeah, absolutely. I think in terms of, assessing against criteria or understanding, being able to break things down into their component parts,
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: definitely has has been something that's been transferred for me.
think just having to have worked so hard at law to really understand the nuts and bolts of something. Like actually, it taught me a lot about practice, to be honest.
To really just persevere with something and to, to learn something at a very deep level. That was my first experience of practice and I really brought that love of practice into everything that I've done. I think practice is just such an interesting phenomenon, and something that is just a very life-giving thing, you know? And once you find that thing that your practice, it's, it's an amazing gift. I, I think. And I've had different practices over the years, so yeah, law was one, it didn't really work out, but it taught me lots of really useful things. Singing has been another where I've devoted a lot of time and energy and effort into learning the art and technique of singing. and, dedicated hours upon hours, upon hours to that. And and now I find myself doing very similar thing when it comes to research. And so it's almost like practice is one of the through lines in, in everything that I've done. I just think finding something that really challenges you, that you really want to learn is a is a huge part of what's meaningful to be here on the planet.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Love that. Love that. And I so want to talk to you about practice. It's 'cause it's one of the things I really, I'm really interested in. So we're not actually talking about practising here, we're talking about practice, the thing either that we do and the thing that we ga we engage in, and of course practising that skill is within that framework is have I understood that right?
melissa forbes: Yeah, I think having a practice is really important.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: Anyone who's an artist understands what that means.
It's like even if you're a visual artist, if you're in the theatre, you have a practice, don't you? And you have certain things that you have to work on all the time. You are always learning, you're always finding new ways to um, express yourself within that particular medium. I just find that so fascinating. And I feel like for me now, research is the thing where I get really excited about building my skills and learning new ways of doing things and finding creative ways through. And to me, they're all kind of the hallmarks of practice, you know.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: Gillyanne, we'll probably get onto this but, in terms of my book I used Positive Psychology as, as a lens. And I've learned through positive psychology that one of my signature strengths is love of learning. And that's the thing that kind of ties all those random experiences together, is that at every stage I've been driven by just that curiosity to learn more and more. And it's like an insatiable thing that I can never, it's a thirst I can never quench.
Jeremy Gillyanne: I love That. That's really clear as well. And I'm, I I love that you look for patterns within things. So the pattern for you is the, the business of learning how, and the learning what, and the learning why and where and when. And there's something very interesting about the whole learning thing is that you've taken research, which is, and I'm, you can, you can shoot me down on this one.
It is essentially a dry subject. It's essentially, you, you have to have your facts, you have to have your methodology, you have your processes but you found a way to make it creative in the application, in the, the doing of it, in the collecting of it. Even if you then can't "quotes" be creative within the reporting of it.
melissa forbes: But you can,
Jeremy Gillyanne: Oh, go on, go on, shoot me down.
melissa forbes: I actually honestly think that this is the most creative I've ever been is, is in research because it's about generating new knowledge. It's about connecting things that haven't been connected before, and that's the definition of of creativity, you know, and in terms of the way you present it, there there are so really interesting arts-based methods now where you can present your findings as poetry, as photos, as works of art, as musical recordings.
So I haven't actually done that myself yet, but I am really keen to explore. Poetic inquiry is, which is where you present your findings as poems. That's gonna be something I'm gonna work on in the future.
Jeremy Gillyanne: I'd go to that.
melissa forbes: Yeah. I think, that's a, that's an obvious way in which research findings are presented in a very creative and artistic way.
But I'm also really interested just in story. That's another thing that I find fascinating. And so with my research, I try to make sure that it's accessible. People can read it and understand it. They don't have to go and, look up a thousand different words to try to understand what I'm saying, and it's actually has a story to it. So again, like that's another part of the practice of research that I absolutely love is like, how can I make sure that when I write a journal article, it actually actually tells story that someone wants to read and it's gonna resonate with them. And so that's again, I think it's a bit of a creative thing, to be able to, to do that in a way that resonates with the reader.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Love that.
And do you know, that enables me to segue to the book. Now, there's gonna be a bit of fluttering of papers here because of my extensive notes. One of the things I especially liked, let me see if I can find it here, that you used terms that are relevant to singing leadership and music. So for example, you had call and response,
melissa forbes: Mmm,
Jeremy Gillyanne: as part of your chapter structure, you had resonance, you had practice points.
melissa forbes: Mmm.
Jeremy Gillyanne: I think you had a, a coda at the end. Let me see what it was that you did write at the end.
melissa forbes: I had a finale at the end.
Jeremy Gillyanne: A finale at the end
melissa forbes: yeah.
Jeremy Gillyanne: that it, it was all enmeshed in this idea of, of music making. And yet what you'd done was you'd really interweaved because you, you were telling stories actually and relating stories of people that you interviewed, but you interweaved that with really solid research and, the framework you've just referred to, which is the, the psychology framework.
Just tell me what it was again.
melissa forbes: Positive Psychology.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Positive psychology
melissa forbes: Hmm.
Jeremy Gillyanne: that it's actually a jolly good read.
melissa forbes: Thank you.
Jeremy Gillyanne: And, and I think that's super important. I, I, I do so much agree with you that research should be seen as creative. We had uh, training for our registered teachers last night with Kittie Verdolini Abbott, and she was talking about procedural learning.
And that sense of if we can do the embodied learning and have the experiential, it informs the declarative, which is where we tend to see the academic writing and the academic research, but actually we need to have that embodiment in order to really learn at a deep level.
melissa forbes: Absolutely.
Jeremy Gillyanne: anything that researchers can do to move, move us more towards that, I think is a fabulous thing.
melissa forbes: Oh, for sure.
Jeremy Gillyanne: We've, we've jumped a bit. Mm-hmm. So I want to go back to.
melissa forbes: Yes, we have,
Jeremy Gillyanne: You. That's all right. We, we do. Yeah, we do. We do that. We do.
melissa forbes: How did we get here?
Jeremy Gillyanne: Yes. Yeah. I want to go back to being at the Con and going and starting that journey, that part of your journey. So go back there. Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: I had no idea what I was doing.
Jeremy Gillyanne: That must have been scary because you've been in a very structured career. Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: yeah.
it Yeah. It was really, I, when I think about it now, you know what a nerve I had to even turn up and audition in a way, because I auditioned for the jazz program. Actually, I lie, I auditioned for the classical and jazz program.
I auditioned for the classical first because that's what I thought they offered. And I had been having some classical lessons and then they, they were very kind, but they, they were like, mm, do you know that we actually offer jazz? And I was like, oh, do you? Okay, just maybe you should go to that one. go to that audition. And so I went to the jazz audition a few months after the classical one.
And again, I didn't even know what jazz was. Like there was no internet. It, I think we forget what it was like back then.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: We talk like it's the dark ages. But it was, it was really quite hard to find information in a way. Like you had to really, go, go to some effort to find out things.
And I hadn't been exposed to jazz, so I didn't know what it was. Luckily I had a friend, he said, oh, why don't you sing like Thelonius monk, around midnight? I'm like, oh, who's that? Yeah, that sounds cool. Anyway. So I did that, and, you know, rocked up and, I did a, must have done a fairly convincing job of it because I, passed actually. Passed both auditions surprisingly. But anyway, that's all to say I had no idea what I doing. I didn't know anything about jazz and I I threw myself it with absolute gusto, like I do with everything else. then became obsessed with that for a good, good while, and jazz is the kind of thing you could just stick with it for the whole, for your whole life, and you'd never learn all there is to learn,
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
just the gift that keeps on giving in that respect. And so then when I, when I finished at the Con I did embark on a, performance career and I recorded an album and all the usual things because that was what we were very subtly told was what the good people did. If you wanted to be the best, then you had to pursue a performance career. There wasn't any discussion back in those days of portfolio careers or all the different things that musicians are doing these days.
Jeremy Gillyanne: yep.
melissa forbes: It was very all or nothing.
And I found after a while that performing was really de-energising. I found it it wasn't feeding my soul in the way that I thought it was supposed to. And, you know, as we all know, there is so much more to getting up on stage than just getting up on stage. Lugging heavy equipment, trying to deal with with difficult band members, writing charts, arranging music, promoting yourself, you know, being responsible for how many tickets have been sold. All of that stuff. It just completely overwhelms.
Jeremy Gillyanne: It's massive.
melissa forbes: The thing that you really wanna do, which is just get up and sing. And so i gradually flamed out of that, I gradually lost interest, and then found myself, happenstance in a casual academic role. And again, had no idea what that entailed, didn't know what it meant to work at a university. Probably took me at least 8 to 10 years to really figure out that, oh, I'm supposed to be doing research. know, it was just,
There's so many things in my life life where I'm like, I don't know how I could not have known that, but I didn't, and yeah, just, figuring out each step of the way, what it is that I'm supposed to be doing to make it work has been another theme that's run through everything that I've done.
Jeremy Gillyanne: I wanna pick this up straight away. We recognize this. Both of us recognize that. Yes, absolutely. I because I'm also really interested in turning points for people
Mm-hmm.
like the, the first one, the first one when you went from working in law to go to music college was a quite a distinct, definite, that's a turning point. That's the day I can point to.
melissa forbes: Yeah.
Jeremy Gillyanne: this one, which is performing doesn't satisfy me. It's not working in the way that I thought it ought to. Sounds like a more gradual one.
melissa forbes: Yeah,
Yeah, for sure. Again, hats off positive psychology because it's helped me unpack what that was all about. It wasn't like I sucked, you know, I was pretty good and I would've gotten a lot better if I'd stuck with it. I probably would be quite masterful right now if I'd stuck with with all this time, but, I was, I had skills for sure. But it had become what in positive psychology terms is called a learned behavior. So we have our signature strengths and if we're operating from our strengths, we feel energized, we feel alive. We are like, this is what what I meant be doing.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: But for me, performing, started out as that. But it gradually over time, turned into something like, oh God, do I really have to do this gig? Oh, do I really have to work with that person? Oh, and so it was, it became quite de-energizing and deflating and almost demoralizing. It wasn't that I was bad at it, but I wasn't getting that kind of energetic return anymore.
I think, I think that's a really important distinction to make for people. Even if you're good at something, if it doesn't actually make you feel feel that feeling.
this is really, I'm in my zone here, then you need to have a think about whether it's something you want to keep doing, and
I, yeah,
that's another, another theme for me.
I've been good at a lot of these things. I was, I did very well at university, but did it make me feel like I was in my element? No way. You know?
Jeremy Gillyanne: This is very interesting.
melissa forbes: Having the language to talk about that at the time would've been very helpful.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Yes. I'm gonna say this is this, although I recognize all the things that you're talking about, this language and methodology and labeling is something that's completely new to me and I love having labels for things. Mm-hmm. Even if I discard them next week, it doesn't matter. It's a nice lens, isn't it?
It it really is. And it's oh, it also legitimizes the experiences that you go through, and I really appreciate that.
melissa forbes: Yeah, it does. And even if it's something retrospective where you go back and you think, oh, okay, now it makes sense. It's still really helpful
Jeremy Gillyanne: Yes. Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: to understand perhaps why things turned out the way they did. Because another interpretation I could have taken of my performance career was that I, I wasn't that good perhaps.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Yep.
melissa forbes: don't think that was the case.
I think it was more that of the other circumstances surrounding being a musician at that time were such that it really sucked the life out of me.
Jeremy Gillyanne: I think it's so important to pay attention to that, that, you might be really good at something, but if it causes you that much grief, then you really need to rethink what you're doing.
melissa forbes: For sure. For sure.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Yeah.
melissa forbes: And, we, we, we can really fall into that sunk cost fallacy where we think I've spent so much time on it, but you've only got one life as well.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Yes. Yeah. And you have to watch out. I think you need a, a, a strong sort of standpoint to look at the change. Because colleagues will say, oh no, you mustn't give up.
melissa forbes: Uhhuh.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Oh, you must have, we've had it. You mustn't stop. We've had it in our lives. Yeah. Yeah. We've both had it. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting.
I'm gonna go back and read that part of the book.
melissa forbes: I actually don't talk about learned behaviors in the book, but look it up. It's a UK researcher, Alex Lindley He's done a lot of work on strengths within positive psychology, but he has broken it down so that he talks about strengths, learned behaviors, unrealized strengths. And weaknesses. So if we have a weakness, we try to minimize how much time we spend on that, as much as possible.
Don't waste time, time trying to get better at it. It's just a weakness.
Jeremy Gillyanne: 100% with that.
melissa forbes: Understanding unrealized strengths is really important too, because then you can actually seek out opportunities to actually use those strengths more. So yeah, so yeah. It's a very interesting and useful framework.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm. Thank you for that. Mm-hmm. So I would like to segue to, obviously I met you at conference several years ago with Irene Bartlett,
melissa forbes: Yes,
Jeremy Gillyanne: but what really brought you onto my radar was, a short article that you'd written. It was the year that I was doing the AOTOS keynote.
So it was last year that you'd written and published on LinkedIn. And it was about the relationship between the World Health Organization declaring that there was a crisis of social health,
melissa forbes: Mm.
Jeremy Gillyanne: And deep loneliness experienced by so many people in a sense of not belonging.
melissa forbes: Yes.
Jeremy Gillyanne: wasn't just due to the pandemic. It had been coming up for a while, but course the pandemic really crystallized it. And you were saying now when we start to look at music leadership and in particular singing leadership for want of a better word, community singing work, this is one of the ways that we can resolve this issue. And we have noticed, because we have choir leaders and singing leaders come on our training course, we've noticed that singing leadership has been under the radar for a long time.
melissa forbes: Yes.
It's not
Jeremy Gillyanne: new. It's been going on for decades, but now what's happening is there's a, I think there's a really strong wind of change in this area.
melissa forbes: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Gillyanne: So I would love you to talk about how you got there and why you think it's important
melissa forbes: Yeah you're
you're referring to.
an article I wrote for voice and speech review, actually, which was a, a, a literature review and part argument about how we need singers and singing teachers to step into this space because they're very well equipped to be very effective to address these really important issues. But the way that I came into it was again by accident or maybe, but by design. Who knows? I'll, know that answer in 10 years time when I look back. But, I started a singing group for people with Parkinson's at the university when someone approached the university and said, oh, would you consider helping us start a singing group? And this was back in 2017 and I was like, oh gee, it sounds a bit daunting. But happened to have a student at the time who was mature age and very interested in that kind of work, so she really took ownership of the group and I started to do some research around it.
And that has just become the most fortuitous thing that's happened, I think, in my career, to be honest, because that opened me up to the whole world of music for health and wellbeing. Knew, didn't even know that was a thing. And opened me up to the world of participatory or community music, which is many,many moons away from wanting to be the best jazz musician that you can be, you know. It was, it was a whole different way of engaging in music that I was exposed to. And then it was gradually over time revealed to me that, Hey, this is an amazing thing that's happening. It's happening in communities all over the world. And as a musician, I knew nothing about it. That struck me as odd. You know, that those worlds were largely separate. So you have on the one hand
Jeremy Gillyanne: yes.
melissa forbes: The, the kind of the presentational or the performative musician
Jeremy Gillyanne: Mm-hmm.
melissa forbes: who's there to be the best and hopefully be very well known and well respected, and very high skill level artistry, all the rest of it. And then you have the participatory world of music, which is music, making music is for everybody. And, I, I'm so much more interested these days in the participatory world than the performance world. The performance world is still interesting. Um, but I just think given what we're facing as you alluded to Gillyanne, in terms of this so-called global crisis of connection, I think that musicians actually are playing a really important role in helping to alleviate some of that. And we want more musicians to take up that mantle and work with their communities because people are crying out for it. And I actually think that musicians need it as well, because I've also done research on music leaders, and that kind of work contributes to their wellbeing. it can actually reconnect you to your passion for music, which may have been, bashed out of you from trying to be a commercial success.
Do you know what I mean?
Jeremy Gillyanne: Yes. And, and those pressures of, of, of the performative side of things, which I felt really strongly when I was training and, and as a young singer and, and which frankly crushed me because
melissa forbes: Yes, there are a lot of people who have been destroyed by that.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Yeah. Yeah. Because of that pressure. And then on the other side, there's the participatory, which, I, I made a note when I was reading the book.
Surely when we're looking at this, especially with Vocal music making, that was the origins of music. It must have been that people sang together to share stories, to share feelings to, that, that's why we sing, really, and it's why we make music. So somehow we got to this other place and we could look into all sorts of social reasons why that happened.
And I guess none of us would be saying well, performative, now this is, this is not where we need to be. Yes. We need performative. Mm-hmm. I would argue, and I'm sure you would, that a performative experience is also involves the audience and it has that sense of community,
melissa forbes: For sure.
Jeremy Gillyanne: But it's a different, of a different type than participatory.
I don't think one is, one is worse, better, higher, or lower than the other. I think it's really interesting. And what you are describing is something that I've thought of for years, which is the music industry is built of little cogs, and you can be at the top of your cog in whatever you are doing. And then when you move across to another part of the industry, you're at the bottom of that cog.
melissa forbes: Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Gillyanne: There is no real, it's almost like the cogs are separate and there's no real connection between them as a, as a,
melissa forbes: Yeah.
Jeremy Gillyanne: I'm gonna say as a performer, but as a, as a worker. When, when you cross into another genre, when you cross into another situation or another working thing, then you, all the experience that you have in your cog, yes, you can carry some of it across, but you don't end up in the same position.
And I always think of it as music is like a whole, it's not a city. It's like a whole set of little villages. They all connect, but they all have completely different feels. I,
melissa forbes: Mm mm Yeah. I think that's one of the glorious things about participatory music is that none of that exists.
Jeremy Gillyanne: Yeah.
melissa forbes: Everybody's the same. And there's something super liberating about that.
Jeremy Gillyanne: There is so much that we can talk about, but we need to stop here. So we are going to invite you back to carry on the conversation. It's been brilliant talking to you so far. We'll look forward to the next one.
melissa forbes: I would love that. Thank you.
Jeremy Gillyanne: We'll see you soon.
This is a voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher.