DJ Trava

Posts Tagged ‘Drumming’

The company I work for arranged for my department to fly to Australia and stay at one of the top Melbourne hotels where we will participate in a drumming experience for team building and leadership training. There are 27 people in my department, that’s quite an expense for our company to make us learn how to drum. We were all laughing when we got the memo, but, any chance to go to Melbourne, Australia, even if it is with all my fellow co-workers, sounded good to me.

When we all assembled at a conference room in the hotel, I had no idea what to expect. The facilitators put us at ease right away and told us that by drumming together has been scientifically proven to help boost our immune system, relieve stress and is an unbeatable ice-breaker because it requires team work and it will motivate, inspire, empower and unify our whole department. Of course they knew what our first question was, ‘how will drumming do this?’ and they were prepared with an answer: they told us to consider the pure and simple musical elements which are the building blocks of music, drumming and percussion. Those elements are rhythm and harmony, melody and pitch. But, they also included timbre into the mix which is more a dynamic rather than an element.

They continued to explain that the elements and timbre have the potential for promoting and inducing relaxation, peace, calmness, energy and rejuvenation. All are a part of healing. The very elements and dynamics of percussion and music have been used the world over to induce healing. The healing does not refer to the healing of bleeding skin, or other physical traumas, though it may help with how quickly these ailments heal. Rather, the healing refers to developing a greater sense of well being. They told us that whatever state a person is in, that combining the elements of music and the dynamics of percussion, will only increase the sense of well being and relaxation, so then it can be said that a healing has occurred. So, the art of drumming is an ideal healing art.

But, we had no idea what this had to do with building up are team. They handed us our drums and told us that by the end of the day, we should have created a piece of music, all percussion, that we would be proud to play at any symphony house. I’ve never had so much fun in my life. My whole department, every single person all worked so well together and we even found out that some of our team mates were very talented drummers! We worked through the whole day, not even noticing the time, we enjoyed everyones input (drumming) and tried to figure out how to incorporate everyones own sense of rhythm into our creation, our symphony of percussions. When we got to play our piece in front of the facilitators, we were all beaming with smiles and totally paying attention to all the nuances and changes in rhythms anyone brought into the piece. We all just flowed with the beat. When it was over, I noticed a few of my team mates were crying. From that day on, I knew my department now had the means to work in harmony together.