Owl Mountain Music, Inc.

Dedicated to helping your sing your soul

grunewald guild

Prime the Pump at Grunewald Guild

By

The Centrum

COMING UP:  Sept 8-11, 2016  Space is limited, sign up early!

After experiencing the marvelous songwriting retreat at the Guild this spring,
I am honored to be leading this Musicianship & Creativity retreat (with the exciting cooperation of visual artist, Sarah Jane) at the Grünewald Guild in Leavenworth, Washington next month and would love to have you join us!

There is limited space available (only 12-count’em, twelve),
AND, if you sign up by August 15th, you get a discount! (Is that cool or what?)

What is this about?

Often we have scouted the terrain and have the well dug and the pump installed but nothing is being brought up to the surface.

Or, we can recall the excitement of the gusher days when all the cool, refreshing underground well-water came pouring forth freely, but these days the pump cranks and cranks and nothing is coming.

And we can feel fear and the encroaching doubts of our clinical interior critics pointing out our failures and nagging us with reasons why we do not deserve to be creating at all.

Or we are just anxious to find our audience, the thirsty seekers of what flows from our fountains.

Sometimes we need to focus our attention on Priming the Pump which in this retreat we will do by exploring some different, hands-on art forms to uncover the fruits of this cross-pollination for our own musicianship.

Start your Fall Season off by Priming your Pump in this focused, intentional setting!

I’d love to be able to share this experience with you in this marvelous setting.

Here are some of my photos from the gathering in March & April.  

I can’t wait to see the late summer/beginning of Autumn in the Cascades, 
and I’d love to celebrate it with you!
While she plays my soul is filled

Labyrinth

The fallen stump sprouts new growth…

Perfect outdoor office!

Grunewald Songwriting Workshop

By

Jan Krist, visual artist and song-writer, led us through a powerful creative process at the Songwriting Workshop she hosted at the Grünewald Guild in Leavenworth Washington this Spring.
The Grunewald Guild is named for Matthias Grünewald, 
 
“a German painter who ignored the classicism and idealism of the current Renaissance style and painted in a more expressive and intense style than his contemporaries.”
 
The Guild is a retreat center and a community that facilitates the exploration between art and faith/spirituality.
 
At the beginning of 2016  had committed to set aside some time and resources for my first continuing education time in many years so when my daughter invited me to join her at this songwriting workshop, it seemed like the perfect opportunity.
 
My Assigned writing companion.
For a long time I have felt like my creative voice was being given expression only in instrumental music, with there being little to say of any value or interest in the current climate of wordiness. 
 
There IS power in nonverbal music, nonverbal communication, which I see daily in my Music Together classes with preschool (and pre-literate) human beings.
 
However, thanks to the safe (and challenging) container that Jan helped to create and a process which helped to facilitate focus and a timeframe to produce a song to share with the rest of the community at the end of the retreat…I found myself rejuvenated and refreshed!
 
 My “office” on the bridge and my explorations of the external geography (which paralleled and revealed my internal geography) led me to produce not one but two songs!  

This earned me the title of “overachiever”!  lovingly bestowed upon me by the rest of the group.

Demo recordings of Barefoot Ballet and The Center Calls have been shared with my patrons as rewards on my patreon page  and are in consideration for a new recording project as well.