Composing Community Global Organization (CCGO) is an interdisciplinary organization exploring communication, listening, participation, and connection through playful, structured, and multisensory practice.

CCGO was founded by composer, conductor, educator, and researcher Keren Rosenbaum and grows out of long-term work in composition, performance, education, and community settings. Across these contexts, we are interested in what happens when people listen and create together: how contributions meet, how participation forms, and how shared processes emerge from many different voices, rhythms, perspectives, and ways of being.

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The Origins

The work began in music. In Rosenbaum’s compositions and participatory projects, listening is part of composing. Participants are invited to notice one another, respond, lead, follow, pause, change direction, repeat, interrupt, and begin again. Music emerges through these relations as much as through sound.

These practices developed into the Active Listening Playground and moved into schools, universities, choirs, cultural projects, and community work. Sound remains central, but never alone. Movement, gesture, space, silence, visual cues, rhythm, touch, objects, and presence are already part of how participants listen and respond.

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The Exploration

Over time, this became a broader field of exploration. We became increasingly interested in the multisensory layer of communication: how people meet and affect one another before, alongside, and sometimes without words. A shift in pace can invite closeness. A pause can open space. A small movement can be answered by sound. Following and leading are often interchangeable.

Listening also includes our own participation. How am I listening? What am I noticing? What does my response make possible? What changes if I wait, join, or shift how I respond?

This ongoing inquiry led to The Playground Approach (ALP)™.

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The Playground Approach

The Playground Approach is practiced through exercises, scores, games, and facilitated processes.

Participants work with sound, movement, rhythm, space, gesture, silence, objects, and attention, exploring what happens between them. Activities may begin simply: starting and stopping together, following timing, responding across modalities, changing roles, or continuing what another has begun.

There is always something clear to engage with and something open to discover.

Play is central. It allows repetition without sameness. We can return to an action with a different rhythm, material, or perspective. We can notice what shifts, what stays connected, and how roles move between participants. Unexpected contributions often open new directions.

No prior artistic or musical experience is required. The work can remain simple or become layered depending on context.

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Reflexive Listening

One of the central practices is Reflexive Listening. It involves listening to another person while becoming aware of how we ourselves are participating. Timing, distance, movement, tone, attention, silence, and expectation are already part of the interaction. Listening becomes something we explore from within the exchange. We listen, respond, notice, adjust, and listen again. The aim is not a single correct way of relating, but greater sensitivity to how communication is already forming, and expanded possibilities for participation.

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Cross-Discipline Work

CCGO’s work continues to move across fields. The Playground Approach is now explored in artistic, educational, therapeutic, developmental, organizational, and community contexts. Each field brings different questions, conditions, and forms of knowledge. We are interested in the crossings themselves.

What happens when a composer’s exercise is used in therapy? What does an educator notice that an artist may not? How does a question from one context transform when it returns to another? What becomes visible when different disciplines look at the same interaction together?

We call this cross-discipline work. The aim is not to merge fields, but to let their differences remain active. Each context reshapes the practice and reveals new aspects of it. What is learned in one place may return elsewhere in unexpected form. CCGO supports this work through workshops, training, courses, research, artistic projects, curriculum development, and collaborations with practitioners, institutions, and communities.

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An Evolving Practice

The Playground Approach continues to develop through practice, observation, research, and collaboration.

We continue to ask: How do we listen to what is already happening? How do we join without taking over?

How do different voices create something together? What changes when we listen with more than our ears?

And what becomes possible when play allows us to try again differently?

 

CCGO is a space for continuing to explore these questions—across disciplines, with others, and through the changing situations in which communication comes alive.