Song Rewriting





Exercises used in:
Pan-African Children’s Songbook
Palestine Children’s Songbook

Modes: Production


Song Rewriting addresses a primary and a secondary problem:

1. (Primary) People are isolated from struggles of the past or places elsewhere so that they feel a fixed distance from it and therefore take a fixed attitude toward it, never relating it to their own experience and activity except weakly through sloganeering and so on.

2.(Secondary) Practically, many people struggle to make something from nothing. We discuss this in more detail when talking about Production.

Relationship to the Past and other Places

This technique is used to create new iterations of cultural production from elsewhere. It’s often used as a means to introduce songs from movements that are in some way relevant to the students engaged in learning. The task of the student is to move beyond a sort of hollow reading of the song as something external to them, as something from another time and place. The aim is for the student to find ways to relate to it, to narrow the space between the subject(s) of the song and themselves. The aim is always to do something with what we are learning, even if that something is small.

Why start from an existing song rather than asking people to start from scratch?

We find that when it comes to making things, people often struggle if they are asked to start from nothing. People can end up with decision paralysis. We find the process of making things can be aided greatly by giving people a clear place to start, a scaffolding of sorts. Introducing a pre-existing work like a song, a poem, and asking people to borrow from it has proven to be an effective way to get people over this hump of creative paralysis and onward, swiftly, into the stage of production.

~ Instructions ~

Take a song or poem from the struggle that you are all learning about. It should be something that was/is popular and used widely. We have found things like anthems and nursery rhymes work well. Put it in the left column.

Students then write their own song to a simple tune that is familiar to them (children’s songs work well). Encourage them to use words from the source song.



After the exercise, encourage students to share their work with each other. This requires a bit of bravery from the students because many people are scared of singing in front of others. Good facilitation skills are needed to be encouraging and to work out what will make students comfortable. The use of familiar children’s songs again helps with this.



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