A Three-Day Orientation Workshop on Conducted Improvisation with Huda Asfour
Friday-Sunday, September 18-20, 6:30-8:30 pm
Who can attend? New members and Old members of the Brooklyn Improv Orchestra
Fees: Suggested donation between $12 and $80 for the three-day workshop.

How can large groups compose music together in real time?

This workshop investigates improvisation as a social practice. Participants develop tools for collective composition through gesture, listening, distributed leadership, and ensemble awareness.

Drawing on Butch Morris, and the open source gesture protocol by the Orchestra Elettroacustica Officina Arti Soniche (OEOAS), and Huda Asfour's own evolving research, participants explore conducting languages that enable groups to create complex musical forms without predetermined scores.

We will begin with an orientation workshop for those interested in joining us to build a group that works together on Collective Composition and Musical Leadership. After the orientation, we aim at agreeing to meet Bi-Weekly at Jalopy to gather and rehearse, and build collectively with each other.

The following bi-weekly sessions will be donation based as well.

Topics covered:

• gesture as musical language

• collective listening

• musical leadership

• distributed decision making

• ensemble awareness

• real-time composition

• improvising large ensembles

• conducting vocabularies

• emergence and complexity

Exercises include:

• conducting drills

• gesture vocabulary

• ensemble response

• instant composition

• rotating conductors

• leadership exchange

• small and large ensemble improvisation

Suitable for:

• improvisers

• composers
• singers

• conductors

• educators

• ensembles
• community music practitioners
• instrument players from all levels (yes, even if a beginner!)

About Huda Asfour:

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, educator, and cultural organizer based between Cairo and Brooklyn. Her artistic practice spans composition, songwriting, improvisation, film, and multimedia performance at the intersection of classical Arabic music, SWANA folk traditions, and improvisational practice.

Her recording work includes two studio albums: Mars, Back and Forth (2011), funded by Al Mawred Al Thaqafi (Culture Resource), and Kouni (2018), supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), alongside a wide range of international collaborations.

Her latest solo project, Naqus, explores repetition and resistance through melodic looping and was featured on Democracy Now!. Her scoring credits include the award-winning films This Day Won't Last (2020), Blue Dive(2012), and Ship of Fools (2025).

She is co-founder and member of the Cairo and Brooklyn Improv Orchestras, where she develops conducted improvisation for medium- and large-scale electroacoustic ensembles. She also teaches workshops on Arabic music aesthetics and the relationship between language and melody, supported by a Mophradat Artist Grant (2019). Huda holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from George Washington University and brings over a decade of experience as a researcher and educator in electrical and biomedical engineering. More on hudaasfour.com

Orientation for Conducted Improvisation - A Three-Day Workshop with Huda Asfour

Orientation for Conducted Improvisation - A Three-Day Workshop with Huda Asfour