Testimonio and Collective Songwriting

The Collective Songwriting Process (CSP) is a collaborative composition protocol that has roots in Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatistas are an autonomous group in Mexico that is composed of various Mayan cultures that speak a variety of languages (Gonzalez, 2020). While the roots of these communities extend generations into the past, this group gained global exposure due their popular uprising against the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 (Khansnabish, 2012). The shared principle that guides interactions within this group is called Zapatismo.

This philosophy is based on Indigenous world views and focuses largely on the principle of “participatory horizontality,” which is a method that allows for a diffusion of power in a particular practice in an effort to maximum community participation (Figueroa Hernandez, 2007). Additionally, Zapatismo has also incorporated pedagogical techniques from urban guerilleros that helped to organize this group against government forces. These include developing a profound understanding of Indigenous epistemologies, critiquing their own revolutionary values that were steeped in EuroEnlightenment assumptions, subjugating their own political desires to the needs of the communities they serve, and embracing to power of collective decision-making (Khansnabish, 2012).

The Collective Songwriting process (CSW) was brought to the United States and developed for community projects by scholar/organizer/activist musicians Martha Gonzalez and Quetzal Flores. After studying these techniques with musician/activist Rosa Marta Zarate in Chiapas, Gonzalez and Flores further refined this approach for use in a variety of community-based settings including juvenile detention centers, community music and education forums, and transnational musical collaborations (Gonzalez, 2020).

The process itself is imbued with this philosophy of Zapatismo in several ways. First, the process provides space for all participants to share their lived experiences and community concerns as well as participate in a collective decision-making process that will allow for their ideas to be incorporated into a final musical artifact. This relates to the notion of participatory horizontality in that all members are allowed to participate in ways that honor their specific skill set. Whether they are instrumentalists, vocalists, lyricists, dancers, or even visual artists, all participants are provided with an opportunity to contribute. Second, the Collective Songwriting process provides a space where individuals can theorize on their community needs and develop these thoughts and perspectives into “sung theories” (Gonzalez, 2020, p. 94).

Through their sharing of narrative developments of lived experiences and perspectives, or testimonies (Reyes & Curry Rodriguez, 2012), participants reimagine new ways of engaging community issues that are in line with their specific modes and conceptualizations of action. Additionally, these testimonios also serve to document community world views thus allowing for a more thorough understanding of the ways in which they make sense of their specific contexts. Lastly, the Collective Songwriting process challenges Eurocentric notions of knowledge validation. Rather than focusing on mechanical composition procedures that prioritize specific musical techniques and theory, the principal epistemologies that guide the creative process in CSP are “convivencia [coexistence], testimonio, trust, healing, and knowledge production” (Gonzalez, 2020, p. 94). This allows for the creative process to always be grounded in community needs and modes of artistic expression.

Songwriting as Classroom Process. As a compositional process, CSW is a flexible approach that has several entry points. As such, there is no sequence that must be followed but rather, there is a loose framework that allows for the community of participants to guide the creative process. The compositional activity begins with an educator facilitating community conversations that serve to draw out from students their testimonios or views on community needs, concerns, and desires. These testimonios are then crafted into verses and choruses through a collective decision-making process.

Concurrently, while the testimonios developed by one group of students form a collage of expressed thoughts into a pastiche of words, phrases, and sentences that emerge as song lyrics, a second group of students begin to generate chord progressions, melodies, and rhythms that amplify the tone that these testimonios have taken. Music educators are there to provide questions and comments as prompts for the development of lyrics and music, and to facilitate and encourage ideas to flow, even while students engage one another in creating the spirit of the song, the poetic images, the musical matter. When music educators join with the students on instruments, they may suggest initial musical ideas, and yet all members of the community are welcomed in as contributors to musical ideas regardless of their proficiency with voice or instrument.

After elements of the collective song are finalized, the two groups of students rehearse the musical artifact, be it the lyrical or the instrumental component. Opportunities for performing on an instrument, or singing the newly fashioned lyrics into a melody, or dancing to the song are extended to the entire student group. This provides opportunities, too, for students to switch groups, or to help one another out across the aisle, where an instrumentalist may offer a vocal line or a member of the lyrics group may take up the cajon or conga drum.

The focus of the rehearsal is not about presenting a perfect performance but, rather, on maximizing participation from all group members. The final performance, whether for one another or to the public, a group of friends, or family members, is documented and shared with the group. This performance and its recording is an important step in the process because it allows the final product to serve as an artifact of a collectively mediated expression of new possibilities, or what Holland et al. (2003) would refer to as a “figured world” (p. 41). The experience of repeated listening to these “sung theories” (Gonzalez, 2020) is what compels the participants toward action by allowing them to “pivot or shift into the frame of a different world” (Holland et al., 2003, p. 51).