Monday 15 - Friday 19th August 2011

Monday 15th August

Just over a month ago Simon and I had a meeting at ‘Navigation Care’ in Lincoln, a privately run day centre for adults with learning and mental handicaps with the aim to set up a number of workshops for the customers who use the centre. With a bit of diary jigging, e-mails and phone calls we set up our first music session and today was that day.

After a morning in the office I met up with Gary Hammond at the centre at one and we set about making some music. The session consisted of a show and play session, Gary’s hoard of instruments is now infamous around these parts and he brought just a small selection today to show the participants and let them explore the sounds they make. This format although very simple worked fantastically well and allowed the participants to have a musical experience whilst not having to worry about playing musical parts. Most of the instruments had an interesting visual or movement element bringing and extra level of stimulus to the experience, great for those who were hard of hearing or sensitive to loud noises. The sessions were very relaxed, consisting of around fifteen minutes of music making with a ten minute break then another fifteen minutes etc until three o’clock. Hopefully I’ll be going back solo to do some more work at Navigation, the staff and customers are great as well as the vibe of the place and I’d like to work with special needs in particular some more as it seems the music world passes these people by too often.

Tuesday 16th August

Another episode of ‘Bob the Builder’ was in the making today…yes! Another workshop day at Liam’s, the plan? To build some rain-sticks!

To start off we had a trip up town to buy the necessary ingredients; two poster tubes, nails and some yarn. The construction couldn’t have been easier, we first marked out a spiral of holes down the length of the poster-tube, secondly we pushed nails into these markers, and thirdly we put rice inside the tube and sealed it. Job done. Well, almost, tomorrow we shall take the yarn we bought and help the children at Binbrook wrap the tubes to make them look a bit more exciting than they currently are.

Wednesday 17th August

8 a.m. and possibly our earliest start here at the trust, today was a long day but a very rewarding one. We started our work in Wainfleet at 10 a.m. running a music making session for ‘Action for Young Carers’. Pete and I were particularly nervous about this session as the group consisted of teenagers, a demographic we’ve not yet worked with. All of this nervousness and apprehension however was not needed as the group were great to work with, there were of course points where we stumbled a little, we knew were going to have adjust on the fly to suit the ability and attitude of the group so this was fine. Creative, is the word that summed up this group, rather than dictating the patterns they played the group took a life of its own and came up with some really interesting stuff, the occasional bit of guidance helped steer the boat but all in all we worked with their ideas. The more creative groups although harder to keep control of are on the whole more fun to work with; we’re in the business of creativity so to do anything other than encourage it would be wholly counter-productive.

Our afternoon meant heading south to Sleaford where we had a meeting with staff at two day centres run by North Kesteven District Council (NKDC) for adults with learning and mental handicaps. The first centre we attended was located on North Road and catered for the higher end of the age spectrum; middle-age upwards. The attendees seemed to be in fine fettle, very polite and inquisitive…interested to know what these musical ragamuffins were going to get up to.

The second of the two centres was called the ‘Jubilee Centre’. Located off East Gate a stone’s throw from the famous Cogglesford Mill. This centre catered for the younger end of the spectrum mid-twenties to mid-forties with a couple of gentlemen slightly older than the rest of the group. Again the attendees were most welcoming, polite and inquisitive, Spencer in particular very chatty and friendly.

The meetings went extremely well and resultantly we’re booked in for the next four Thursdays to run music sessions at each of the centres, again the more relationships we can build with organisations the better.

Friday 19th August  

Goodbye Wainfleet. Our last session for A.Y.C. was today and it proved to be one of, if not the best workshop we’ve run to date. The group again consisted of young teenagers, but was a complete contrast to the last group. Focus and timing are the two words that immediately spring to mind and made this the group that we’ve taken the furthest musically. We’ve been told not to go into workshops expecting too much in the way of getting to a developed musical piece, the idea is to facilitate and experience of music making. The result of today’s efforts was a two movement piece complete with break and outro; for the most part the attentiveness and timing of the group, as well as their ability to work as a team were key in allowing us to do this, very commendable indeed.

From a personal development stand-point it felt like all the pieces of puzzle came together today, all of the advice from Liam and Gary’s mentoring being used. Strong leadership, clear direction, steady development of themes and exercises and patience were all put into practice and this can only spell good things for future workshops and our development as community musicians.

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Monday 8th - Thursday 11th August 2011

Monday 8th August

The recurring theme of our office days on a Monday has been web-design/branding. Our task for the half-day was to research and report back on web-designer companies, providing feedback on which we liked and which we didn’t and more importantly why we thought certain web-designers suited us more than others. Not much more to report on that really!

Tuesday 9th August

A couple of months ago I had a conversation with a friend; Amy Briggs who mentioned she worked for an organisation called ‘Action for Young Carers’, we chatted about working with young people and our experiences in this field and sowed the seeds for some cross-organisational work. After many emails and phone calls everything had come to fruition and we were booked for four sessions at the A4YC respite residential stays at Skegness Grammar School in Wainfleet (Lincolnshire).

Today’s session consisted of an hour’s workshop with 21 children from the age range of 7 – 11 years. With it being such a nice we decided to lead the session outdoors in the grounds…big mistake! Although the idea of doing a workshop outside seemed perfectly pleasant the reality was not for a number of reasons.

a)      The wind carried our voices making it very hard to be heard clearly.

b)      It was hard to keep the children in a tight group.

c)       Many distractions…in particular Ladybirds!

d)      The lack of a room and therefore a resonant chamber of sorts meant the quieter instruments were completely lost against the sound of the louder instruments.

As well as being our first session outdoors this was one of the largest groups we’ve lead and this posed a slight amount of intimidation but we worked our best to keep control of the situation. This session also highlighted the need to spend more time on individual exercises and staying on something until the desired result is achieved, it’s this element of time management that does however become second nature over time. Apart from these somewhat negative aspects of the workshops we achieved our main goal in that the children thoroughly enjoyed themselves, as did we.

Wednesday 10th August

We’ve been trying our best to be D.I.Y. gurus over the past two weeks (with some success!), the building session in Binbrook was a success but as mentioned we were having issues with the resonance and volume of the instrument. After looking over the tubing we came to the conclusion that we needed to add more sound holes, so whilst Pete set to work with the power drill I re-glued and re-tightened the frame. The second phase of ‘project xylophone’ was to paint the frame and tubing, in prep for that me and Pete went to acquire some good quality acrylic paints and paint brushes in town. Back at the workshop Pete and I prepped the frame and piping for painting and finished in good time to have a short break before heading to Binbrook.

The painting and music activities running side by side at the activity night proved to be a big success, as you’d expect the boys seeing painting as “too girly” for them to do, so they instead made music with Pete on the junk instruments and provided more than couple of frights via the medium of stray shots from their indoor cricket match! The painting was messy, but hey! What is fun if it’s all clean? The girls did a magnificent job of illuminating the xylophone and got on the task needing only the occasional menial assistance from myself…good to know I’m useful for something haha. It was hard to ignore the sound coming from the music session being led by Pete; the children playing some of the most complex rhythms I’ve heard them play so far, there was also a great flow to Pete’s workshop, bringing in new elements with each exercises and developing in a logical way. Next week we’re going to be doing much the same, although hopefully there’ll be less cleaning up to do afterwards.

Thursday 11th

Another trip across The Fens meant only one thing today, our second workshop at Wainfleet for ‘Action For Young Carers’. With our lesson learnt from our first session we decided to hold our session today indoors. It’s often easy to dwell on the negative aspects of previous experience and admittedly the wayward nature of our last session did rest on the back of our minds, but we were determined to do only what one can do and not make the same mistakes again. The positive attitude paid off for us and the session ran smoothly (almost), the usual folly occurred; children playing instruments when asked not to, volume that Bonham would have been proud of and general  interest in playing anything other than the pattern taught (creativity is always promising to see though).

The group were smaller in number this time round by four, but this made the world of difference in terms of keeping ‘law & order’ and in comparison this group were much more focused and of a higher ability. It’s the variation in abilities and behaviour of groups of the same age that keep the job interesting as it forces us to think on the fly and gives us something to react with; something we encounter all the time as musicians, especially in creative sessions. As ever we had fun and the exercises ran smoothly for the most part, after an hour or so we could that group was waning in energy so we wrapped things up by getting each person to do a small solo and then ended with a big crescendo of noise…very avant garde. 

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Monday 1st - Wedenesday 3rd August 2011

Monday 1st August

Brand new shiny designs for the trusts branding were on the table today for us today and this along with marketing was the dominating theme of our day in the office. As you’ll be able to read on the main Firebird website, Ross Taylor is our resident graphic designer and since joining the trust has been working on logos and designs for our press and promotional materials. With all staff present we looked through and option of designs that Ross had produced for Firebird Flyers to give our opinions on what we liked and what we liked less (there wasn’t anything we didn’t like!). We all agreed that the new designs (some of which you can see below) will bring fresh new image to the organisation and something that will be easily identifiable as ‘The Firebird Trust’.

Tuesday 2nd August

Hack-saws, files and power drills! I know the thought of letting two musicians loose on power tools probably doesn’t do much to ease the mind, but that’s what was on the agenda for today. As part of our contribution to the Liam and Gary’s ‘Pebbles in Ponds’ project in Binbrook we’re building instruments with the children and then learning to play them, our first construction for the project is a ‘drain pipe xylophone’.  The construction process went very smoothly, albeit in the blistering heat of an English summer’s day; by lunch time we had the majority of the frame constructed and marked out ready to place the for the mounts for the piping. After lunch we marked out, drilled and got our pipes mounted onto the frame, excited to hear the end result we grab a couple of different beaters and tried it out…

Even the best made plans can falter and after playing the instrument for the first time it was apparent that there was next to no resonance at all coming from the pipes. This was a big problem, if the instrument didn’t sound good then there was next to no point taking to Binbrook the next day. After experimenting with various methods of mounting we still came to no success and by the end of the day were very worried! To solve problem we arranged an emergency build session the for the next day, using our time over night to think about various ways we could get the resonance we needed.

Wednesday 3rd August

Battle stations! Our morning began with sense of heightened urgency; with three hours to get our xylophone working we busied away and during this time a light bulb went off in Pete’s head! Sound-holes. This seemed to work, and although it didn’t quite have the spectacular we expected but it did improve the resonance in a noticeable way, a work in progress.

A drum session was part of today’s fun and games too. Simon has recently been on a mission lately to get more content in the way of videos and imagery for the web-site and associated domains and rightly so. Pete and I have had the idea for a while to do a drum duet/creative exploration session with two drumset in one room. We’re two very different players stylistically and in terms of our approach to technique and playing, part of our session consisted of sharing ideas and concepts that we both use and it was a valuable learning tool for the both of us. The other half of our session entailed creating a collaborative drum piece and this proved to be a fascinating experience and eye opening experience. Gary once commented that Pete and I gel really well as percussionists, seeming to have an instinct for what the other is going to next and this seemed to be the case today. Using a seven movement’s format we created a piece that explored different grooves and styles, some improvisational and some pre-composed:

-          Movement one: cymbal swells soundscape

-          Movement two: call & response fills

-          Movement three: common time rock groove (unison)

-          Movement four: triplet feel rock groove duet

-          Movement five: jazz shuffle

-          Movement six: tribal duet

-          Movement seven: ritenuto to end

To end our hectic day we met back at Liams and headed up onto the Wold to Binbrook. The instrument building was a big success, the children being thoroughly engaged in the whole process of seeing an instrument come together. On top of that success we had a rather good free-jam with the children, choosing just to ‘make noise’ rather than have a structured lesson per se. It’s surprising and rewarding to hear the development of the kids, whom we’ve been doing workshops with for a couple of months now, some rather nice rhythmic patterns emerging and a lot more initiative and confidence on their part. The session was cut short due to cricket but that’s sometimes the way at Binbrook, we don’t aim to impose rather let children come over and partake as when they feel like. The cricket break gave us some time to have a look at our homemade contraption with Gary and Liam discussing several ways in which we can get some more oomph out of it, something to be tried next week!

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Monday 25th - Wednesday 27th July 2011

Monday 25th July

Junk percussion has become an ever increasing theme within our work here at The Firebird Trust and this morning we had a session with Gary to discuss and analyse Pete’s workshop in Hull two weeks ago and also to discuss our planned “Bring Build & Play” sessions that we shall be conducting at Binbrook Activity Night in the coming weeks. Analysing Pete’s workshop was not only useful for him but resulted in us having a clearer plan of how to use junk percussion. The most important lessons we drew from this session were;

-       The playing technique for each instrument should be taught in a thorough manner, and used as way to introduce the pattern(s) they will be playing.

-       Regardless of instrument, every pattern that you are going to use should be taught to the whole group, regardless of whether they will be playing it or not.

-       It’s crucial that all of the patterns relate to each other and form the part of a bigger whole; this gives everyone a common goal to work towards.

-       As a leader you need to have an instrument to conduct and maintain control over the group.

A month or so ago I mentioned during a meeting with Peter and Liam that it would be nice to do a project where we build a set instruments with a group and then play them. After some consideration and discussion we all agreed that this would be a fantastic idea to take to the Binbrook Activity Night over the summer holidays for a period of four weeks. Gary’s input on this tied in to the analysis we did of Pete’s workshops with the kitchen equipment, demonstrating how to use syllables effectively to create a rhythmic piece and how to best pace them within the piece. One of the great nuggets of info related to Samba ensembles and the musical cues and breaks they use to switch between movements in the piece.

Tuesday 26th July

The morning was spent in the office today but the afternoon brought with it an interesting meeting with Marion from the arts organisation ‘IMPart’. The open-mic plan that we drew up last week is something we’re keen to get up and running, so today’s meeting with Marion was an opportunity to discuss using IMPart as a venue and providing a young musicians night. It’s nice to be in the company people who care about music and getting the next generation of musicians out there and in the spotlight and this made for a pleasant meeting. With a common goal in hand we discussed the options for our evenings; acoustic or full band? Week-day or weekend? Performance/showcase or mentoring? The most important aim is to give young musicians and forum to share their music, ideas, knowledge and to be able to network, with so much social media via the internet these days and lack of venues for under 16’s to meet it’s hard to really get to know other musicians.

The results of this meeting are yet to be seen, although it was promising. There is certainly food for thought and many things to take into consideration and areas to work out, but it’s something we’d rather do properly than in haste.

Wednesday 27th

A trip down memory lane today, as I dug out my secondary school design & technology skills!

In preparation for the first session in Binbrook next week with the “Bring, Build & Play!” sessions I drew a set of schematics for the instruments we are going to build with the children which include; drainpipe xylophones, parcel tube rain-sticks and soup tine shakers. It was a fun but demanding task, working out increments in size for the xylophone proving to be somewhat of challenge. With a shopping list e-mailed to Liam everything is hand and ready to go.

As part of our work here we’re often asked for consultation on all manners of areas such as marketing, branding, web-design etc. Our task for this particular afternoon was to read over and give feedback on the draft membership agreement for the organisation “Lincolnshire One” which aims to unify arts organisations in Lincolnshire and promote collaboration for the wider benefit of the county. It was an interesting document and set out a nice philosophy, something that appealed to me however we thought it could have done with a little more in the way of concrete facts and the mechanisms involved in the way of working it set out. 

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Monday 18th - Wednesday 20th July 2011

Monday 18th July

Today found the dream team of myself, Liam and Pete in the office for the day due to Simon and Kayleigh being on FBT business elsewhere. The day was going rather slow until Pete happened upon a fantastic idea whilst making a coffee, why not use the P.A. equipment available to us to host “Firebird Open-Mic Nights”? The latter half of our morning and the most of our afternoon was spent discussing all manner of aspects around the open-mic; age of target audience, venues, format, marketing, potential problems and solutions etc. The upshot of the discussion was that we want to aim these music nights at under 18’s i.e. people who might not necessarily be allowed to play in pubs or licenced venues (where the majority of live music occurs) as we feel this demographic don’t often get the chance to perform publicly. Venue is going to be very important for this project, playing publicly for the first time can be extremely nerve wracking and can put people off performing full-stop. For this reason it is important to find a venue that is public enough to provide good exposure for the young artists, but not be too intimidating that it puts people off. After this discussion we decided to be fantastically annoying to everyone else in the office, taking out all the equipment to create an inventory, all the while in nerdy music gear conversation…musical small talk as Liam calls it.

Tuesday 19th July

With a torrential thirty minute down pour in Lincoln usually leads to the inevitable flash flooding occurred in the Monks around area of town the Croft Street community centre included...and unfortunately this was the case today, receiving a call from Croft Street we were informed the storage room where the other half of the county council’s Gamelan is kept had flooded. With this myself, Robin, Ross, Pete and Kayleigh dropped what we were doing in the office (not literally) and headed down to help move the equipment to a drier location. The roads on the way were terrible, and upon seeing the massive puddle at the centre’s car park we expected the worst. The reality wasn’t quite so dramatic, but considering that most of the Gamelan is made of wood and bronze it was imperative that we get it out of the damp as soon as we could. After half of an hour of hefting, heaving and hauling we had most of the set safe and happy in an upstairs room and so we left Croft Street and our day ended there.

Wednesday 20th July

More office work today, the time being divided up between consolidating our plan for the ‘FBT Open Mic) and planning for our ‘make n’ play’ style junk percussion programme for the Binbrook activity night. Whilst researching junk-percussion earlier in the month we stumbled upon a number of tutorials on how to build your own junk instruments. This set the cogs turning and we realised it’d great to put together a programme lasting over the summer holidays where we build instruments with the children at Binbrook activity night and create a performance piece so show to the staff and parents at the end of the holiday. Gary shall be coming in next week to help with the final planning and details and from there it will just be a case of acquiring materials to make stuff with.

Good headway was made on the open-mic proposition today, and after a chat with Marion Sander from IMPart a meeting has been set-up for next Tuesday to discuss the possibility of putting on a regular young musician’s night for them.  The next stage is going be figuring out our marketing strategy; where and how to advertise, with the schools closed for the summer we have the challenge of finding an effective place to market towards our target audience, something that we’ll no doubt overcome!

For the evening I went to ‘Binbrook Activity Night’ solo (kindly aided by Liam giving me a lift there and back) as Pete was off rehearsing and doing musiciany type things. This provided me a great opportunity to not only to get more experience of doing music workshops on my own, but also to explore the connection built up with the children who regularly partake when Pete and I lead workshops there. Going in with an aim isn’t always the best thing to do but tonight I wanted to set myself a challenge and that was to get all of the children playing in time with each other and to a steady tempo. To do this I started out by just talking to the children about what words they associated with drumming and percussion, after many answers the word “timing” came up. Firmly yet not forcefully I impressed upon them the importance of staying in time and invited them to take up the challenge of holding a good steady rhythm. This process took some work, realising that they I hadn’t mentioned the key thing “listening and feeling” I got everyone to close they eyes and really listen to what they were doing and what everyone else was doing, once they were in time we stayed on the beat then asked them to remember that feeling . Going through this process seemed to make something click; previously we’ve had a battle at times to keep control of everything, but tonight it all worked. By the end of the session we migrated from using just sticks to sticks on washing up bowls, playing a game of pass the rhythm and letting the children explore their own rhythmic ideas too…by the end it was me who was being taught! After a good fourty minutes the session ended with my aim reached and exceeded, proof that sometimes you just to have a little bit of determination and a way of getting things across.

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Monday 11th - Wednesday 13th July 2011

Monday 11th July

Today, as with all Monday’s was our office day and on today’s agenda was more marketing. During the morning we set about analysing The Firebird Trust’s promotion via the medium of flyers, the objective to identify what we liked about it and what we change about it, all from a personal view point. Content of the flyers was also scrutinised, ascertaining what information we felt as a group was relevant and how much content we felt was needed. The general consensus from this was that the content needed to be more concise and descriptive of the trust as a whole, rather than going to detail of every project and aspect. We also agreed that the colour scheme for the flyers could be a lot more vibrant…not in a garish way, but in a way that will catch the eye in a pleasant manner.

Later on during our session we took a look at web-site designs and how various companies/artists brand themselves. The main aspect of this was analysing how these companies and artists conveyed what they do to the public and how we could apply this to our branding overall, with five very different people the opinions varied wildly, but all in all it was still a very useful exercise.

Tuesday 12th July

For dancers it’s “five, six, seven, eight!” for musicians it’s “one, two, three, four!” either way there was a fair amount of counting in today as this was a final rehearsal with Fiona and Naledi for our final performance/music & dance taster workshop  at Dance Box next Monday.

As has been documented on this blog we have been exploring the world of creative collaboration between dancers and musicians and as part of this have been creating and refining a performance piece. With a solid structure and with an interesting piece at hand, today’s session involved repeating the piece over and over to make sure that the execution is as a tight as possible. The session went extremely well and has left us extremely confident that we can put on a good performance.

Wednesday 13th July

To start off today’s entry I’m going to take a quote from the very first FBT Diary post;

“Judgement day! Wednesday was in all honesty the day I was dreading/excited about the most, for this was the first time we were to unleash our workshop on real people!”

So! At the time, the prospect of testing out our workshop for the very first time was rather daunting, well; now that I look back I wonder what all the fuss was about as today was all in all far more terrifying, exciting and revealing. Today we embarked on our final trip to Tilbury Primary school in Hessle  and after observing Liam and Gary do their thing for the last two trips, it was now our turn to deliver workshops to the year one and year two classes.

With two very different plans in hand, mine based on body-percussion and Pete’s based on junk-percussion we set about making noise. The ease the kids into the afternoons activities we decided it best that I take the first twenty minute session and Pete to take the latter twenty minutes. For the whole day I had been extremely nervous about doing my first school workshop and indeed up until the last minute before I was “on” I was a bag of nerves, but with a sudden surge of confidence I took hold of the situation and had fun. Both classes were fantastic, being; attentive, polite, engaged and enthusiastic about the activities. At first I was worried that my workshop was going to be too basic and not hold their attention, heaven forbid! Even bore them! The opposite was quite true in the end; with a room full of smiling faces and the sound of joyous laughter I felt great and somewhat relieved. Pete’s junk-percussion workshop went down a treat too, a very noisy affair but all the same fun to watch and although the children didn’t hold many of the rhythms they were taught, they all had a lot of fun and that’s the most important thing.

The most interesting aspect for me during the day was working with children who are hard-of-hearing. After watching Gary successfully involve them in his workshop I was determined to get them involved. Interestingly enough they were able to hold a beat a much better than a lot of the other children, mirroring my counting movements almost to the millisecond.

Liam and Gary both observed us during our workshops and gave us a full evaluation of our work. This was a great eye opener, making us both aware of aspects of our delivery that were weren’t even aware of. Being able to have your work analysed by two experts is something you don’t often get the chance to do, and the pointers that were given were duly noted and will be implemented into our working practice.

A fantastic day all in all!

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Sunday 3rd - Wednesday 6th July 2011

Sunday 3rd & Monday 4th July

For these two days we took part in some rather interesting training focused around the use of technology in music workshops under the expert guidance of Shirley Novak. During Sunday's session we took a look at various pieces of Mac software that can be used in a creative way these included: i-movie, White-cap and Garage Band as well as the i-phone app "Bloom". The software that interested me the most from this was "White-cap"; a piece of software that creates randomized visualisations in reaction to sound and in effect, can be used to help people "see" the sound they're creating. This has great benefits for the hard of hearing as it allows them to see the effect of the sounds they produce, even though they may not be fully audible to themselves, thus allowing them to be part of creative musical activities. Garage Band was the main piece of software we focused on during the session, a simple yet effective piece of software for creating music using loops. As well as having a large library of loops comprising of various instruments and styles you can very easily record your own loops in using either the internal laptop/computer microphone or an external mic. Away from the Mac we had a look at a rather intriguing item called "Sound Wave". Sound Wave is a MIDI based system which uses infra-red as means of MIDI controller. The pitch of the music reacts to the distance between a surface and the aperture of the controller, clickable pads also allow you to trigger extra sounds or to simple cycle through them. Invented by and for dancers this system provides a rather novel way of creating music. 

On Monday we got to see Shirley and the technology in action at Lincoln Minster School during a day of workshops with year; 9, 8 and 6 students. The workshops consisted of the same programme for all years groups; starting with a brief introduction of herself and background and a quick walk through of the equipment and how music and recording technology has changed from an analogue to digital format and the possibilities this presents.

After the introduction Shirley demonstrated White Cap, getting the students to shout out their name and see what it looked like through the visualiser, this proved to be a fun exercise encouraging many a silly noise. After some fun with White Cap Shirley went to explore the relationship between music and emotion and how we perceive visual media with different kinds of music. To do this an excerpt from the film “Out of Africa” was played firstly with the original score by John Barry, the students were asked to come up with words that described the emotions that the film and music portrayed and this produced words such as; thoughtful, sorrowful and relaxed. The excerpt was then played again but with a dance tune called “Take me to the Clouds Above”, a much more upbeat song, when asked for words to describe the film there was a complete change in the way it was interpreted, with words like; fun, bouncy and exhilarating being used.

The main bulk of Shirley’s workshop was the use of Garage Band, and getting the students involved in the creative process of making music. First off, the basic features of the software and processes were demonstrated, the advantage being that the software is extremely easy to use. After this brief tutorial the students went about creating a song; starting with a drum track then a bass-line, guitar, piano etc. Although it may seem simplistic to use samples to create music this is not the case, a major feature of this part of the workshop was about choosing samples that worked stylistically well together and ensuring that the samples were moved into the correct key, for example a bass line in G#Maj wouldn’t sound good with a Guitar part in Dm, so it was up to the students to move the instrument they saw fit. After creating their backing tracks the students were given a chance to record parts on their track live using the inbuilt microphone on the i-Mac, these recording were then spliced and turned into samples and loops, in some cases the entire drum beat was made up of vocal samples.

Watching this workshop and learning about Shirley’s methods gave a great insight into an avenue of music workshops that you don’t often hear of or see, although expensive in terms of gear it makes for an extremely effective method of getting people involved in creating music. With more and more people using computer technology to create music it is apparent that this kind of workshop can give people something they can relate to and recognise and most importantly can do at home if they have the equipment. 

Tuesday 5^th July

With a salutary “Up the Mariners!” as left the tool booth at the Humber Bridge; today were back on the north bank in Tilbury (Hessle) to watch Gary Hammond conduct his workshop with the year 1 and year 2 groups. As was discussed in a previous blog, one of Gary’s favourite workshops is that of creating a soundscape for “Going on a Bear Hunt”. With what seemed like several music shops’ worth of percussion items big and small he set-up in the school’s hall and set to work. Watching Gary work was in short inspiring! The children were thoroughly engaged with the story and gave suitable gusto to the parts they played during the song. During the story there are several obstacles that the family have to overcome from tall grass to a snow storm, for each of these obstacles Gary had certain types of percussion to represent them. Certain children played for certain obstacles and this gave each child a certain responsibility to play their part at the correct time and to pay attention to the narrative, or in musical terms; know where their part fit into the form of the piece. Giving the children this responsibility in my opinion was a great as it incorporated a skill that is used in a number of settings and situations in everyday life and as has been said, the idea of doing these workshops is to embed not only musical skills but life skills as well.

This session was particularly interesting as Tilbury Primary is a school that not only caters for the abled but also caters for the hard of hearing; in today’s group there were four children for whom this was the case. It was interesting to see the way that Gary incorporated the children into the piece, using instruments that had a strong visual appeal and moving parts to help them see their part in the story. This attitude is something I feel is very important as Gary didn’t see the hearing problems the children have as an impassable barrier, rather the opposite encouraging them to be involved and making them an integral part of the performance just as every child in the group was.  

On the way back to Lincoln we made a quick visit to the youth club at Brookenby next door to Binbrook, indeed Brookenby is a relatively new settlement being developed from the R.A.F. station infrastructure and buildings left after the station closed. We’re hoping to start work with both the junior and senior groups over the summer, probably based on junk-percussion, but this visit was just to say hello and get to know the staff and children who attend the club.

Wednesday 6^th July

With our final visit to Tilbury next week and it being our turn to lead workshops we set about putting final preparations to our plans and discussing with Liam exactly what we plan to do. Pete had opted to go with a junk percussion theme, utilising objects that you’d find in the kitchen. After a trip in town Pete came back armed with; washing up bowls, mixing bowls, baking trays, cheese graters and tea-spoons and went about creating a piece that the children could play. Pete’s plan is to create rhythms based off the syllables of the name for each object, very simple to grasp…hopefully. Liam agreed that this would be a good concept and something that if managed right could yield good results.

Having had some rather chaotic experiences with children and instruments I drew up plans for a body percussion workshop. This workshop will involve clapping, stomping and various combinations or the two, as well as some clapping games in circles, something that’s not too hard to grasp but sounds good. Being safe territory (relatively) I feel then when we go to Tilbury I will be able to confidently lead the workshop and get some good results, the end game being to first and foremost enjoy themselves and secondly to play various rhythms in time with each other and gain an appreciation for teamwork and creating music.

For the afternoon we helped Pete prep his kitchen junk percussion, making beaters to play the various instruments using: dowels, napkins and gaffa tape. It didn’t prove to be the greatest example of craftsmanship in the world but was a fun end to the day and indeed the week!

Don't forget to check out our video blog:

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Monday 27th - Thursday 30th June 2011

Monday 27th June 2011

As you’re probably aware from reading the blogs so far we have the pleasure of working (from time to time) with Gary Hammond a freelance artist with the trust. After our first session with Gary on the 17^th June we were asked to look at the national curriculum for music key-stage one and two and this morning Gary was in the office alongside Liam to discuss our findings and how to incorporate a cross curricular element to our workshops and the importance of providing more than just musical education. This chat gave both Pete and I many great ideas to work with and ways to get more mileage and worth out of our workshops, elements including; basic arithmetic, rhyming words and memorisation to mention but a few.

The second half of our morning with Gary and Liam focused on the children’s story book “Going on a Bear Hunt”. Gary is a big fan of this book and after going through it with him we could see why! The story is based around the theme of adventure and takes in various obstacles along a journey to find a bear in a cave, these obstacle, including; tall grass, a river, a snow storm and a forest provide a fantastic basis for soundscaping. Soundscapes are a great format for workshops with the young or musically inexperienced as they allow the participants to produce a lush sonic landscape without needing any musical experience.  The task for us was to read the story and spend half an hour thinking about how we’d go about turning it into a soundscape workshop; having had bad experience when using a mass of instruments with young people we went back to the body and mouth sound idea. The advantage with body and mouth sounds is that the participant’s interpretation of the story and the sound they produce are not bound by the limitations of an instrument or object and allow them to fully express themselves. Self-expression is a big thing for us, the bones of what we want to do is to get people expressing themselves with as little limitation as possible, providing them with a sense that partaking in the process of making music and sound isn’t exclusive to those who’ve trained. After we explained our way of doing things we listened to Gary’s method or delivering the workshop, in many ways an opposite to ours; utilising different instruments and different sounds but in a very user friendly way. With that we rounded off the session and came away with more fantastic ideas as usual.

Tuesday 28th June 2011

Gamelan! Yes, a return to some Javanese goodness.

Today Simon hosted a training session for teaching professionals and freelance musicians as part of the training work that the trust does. Rather than participating in this session in a musical way I chose to sit back, observe and make notes. For the previous two sessions both Pete and I utilised the opportunity to learn basic technique on each instrument in the Gamelan and have gradually looked more in depth at the set, although this has been useful for getting to know how to do play it hasn’t fully allowed us to get a handle on the teaching method. Not being a participant in the actual music making made a huge difference, it’s said that music is in the listening, and this is certainly true, sitting back and taking in the performance from an outside perspective allowed to hear how the individual parts built up to create the whole and it’s an incredibly powerful form of music.

The other advantage of sitting back was that it allowed me to study in depth the teaching method used and gain a better understanding on how the instrument(s) is taught. These note culminated in an analysis session and the eventual output of a workshop format that both Pete and I feel confident we could deliver with the amount of experience we’ve had, this provides us for another avenue of work, something that the FJF programme is designed to do and there’s no doubt in my mind that working at the trust thus far has created opportunities that will allow us to successfully work after the programme has finished. 

Wednesday 29th June

Off t’ ‘Ull!

No that’s not a typo I assure you, today we had a very pleasant day in Hull, more specifically ‘Tilbury Primary School’ as lovely school in Hessle. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this school over the next three weeks as we shadow Liam and Gary, as well as conducting our own workshops with years one and two.  Today we observed Liam who did workshops based on English folk music; the premise of the workshop was to get the children thinking what people in their very own community were doing a hundred years ago and how they made their music.

The first section of Liam’s workshop focused on a demonstration of instruments; accordion, spoons, bones, mouth harp and harmonica. The focus of this section was to teach the children that music can be made with instruments you make or find in the household and that people who around a hundred years ago often couldn’t afford to by instruments so made music with the objects that surrounded them in their daily lives. 

The second section of the workshop consisted on some good ol’ sing song. The first song was entitled “The Trees in the Valley" and focused on repeating themes and memorisation of words and actions. The second song was entitled “The Herring Song” an old sea-shanty, again this song was built around memorisation of words and actions but added the extra element of rhyming words upped the level slightly and required an extra level of thinking for the children. These examples demonstrated effectively the cross curricular aspect of workshops that was discussed on Monday and engaged the children in thinking about more than just the music and song but required thinking in terms of language and patterns. Both year groups were very well behaved, made active participation in the workshop activities and most importantly enjoyed and learned something from the experience. Peter and I also learned a lot from the experience; having been tutored by Liam we’ve become accustomed to his way of teaching, but it was nice to get the opportunity to see Liam at work and get a grasp on the psychology and character he used with the age group participating, the most important element that stood out being that you shouldn’t be afraid to let your character out and be yourself.

Summary

As usual a fantastic week here at the trust, not only have Pete and I made steps towards expanding our future horizons but have gained more “real world” experience of the work that a community musician does, we’ve also discovered more about the depth of learning working as a community musician can provide to people.

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!

Monday 13th - Thursday 23rd June

Introduction

This week’s blog entry will cover the two weeks from Monday 13^th June – Thursday 23^rd, because of the Firebird away-day the times and days worked have been all over the shop but this blog should provide a summary of the more interesting days over the fortnight.

Monday 13th June 2011

In previous blogs I’ve discussed the on-going collaboration between Firebird and Lincolnshire Dance, exploring creative sessions for music in tandem with dance. Today was a continuation of this process and a chance to further develop our creative relationship and use new knowledge gained since the last session. As was mentioned in last week’s blog we had a creative session with Gary Hammond and explored in depth what makes a good dance piece and what dancers generally require from the music, if any, they’re dancing to.

Our session started off in a much more organised manner than previous ones, getting a clear idea of what we wanted our piece to be like whilst leaving us room for creative manoeuvre. With a bare bones structure we started to construct our piece, this started with a musical idea adapted from the opening movement of the piece we created last Tuesday. After asking the dancers (Fiona and Naledi) to listen to the music and think about the images it conjured up for them, the theme of a face-off between two wild animals came up and so this became the theme for our piece.

Progress was fast to begin with, taking just over an hour to establish the opening to our piece and the first major section and for the most part this involved the dancers reacting to musical cues. After looping what we had for a while we then thought about how to close the first section of the piece, opting to use a cue from the dancers to this. This task, although sounding simple, took a fairly substantial amount of time to refine as there were a multitude of musical options available to use. Several incarnations later and loop after loop of the piece we got to the point where we were mentally burnt out or “muddled” in Fiona’s words, the quality of our output was suffering therefore we took the sensible option and called it a day. Regardless of this we established a great basis of ideas to work from tomorrow and a well-established intro and first section.

Tuesday 14th June 2011

Today was round two of the week’s creative sessions with Lincolnshire Dance and in the lovely ‘Wellingore Memorial Hall’ we set up camp and got to work. After a recap of yesterday’s work and several  run-throughs we got to work on creating more sections for our piece. Using the “free-time” concept talked about with Gary last Tuesday we decided to make the middle section of our piece ambient in nature with no fixed reference for the time or pulse, rather the music formed a response to movements and steps by Naledi.  This proved to a quite challenging musically as the movements and steps were not pre-determined and therefore had to match as and when they happened. The by-product of this actually proved to be quite beneficial, adding a sense of anticipation and tension to the section.

To bring the mood of the piece back up after the free-time section (as we did last Tuesday) we broke out into an Afro-Cuban influenced feel with a 3:2 Son Clave. This                proved to be a great learning experience for me (Kev) as it got me thinking more creatively about the way I could play the snare drum and the variety of sounds I could get out of it, using combinations of; cross stick and brush, drum stick and brush.

The final section of our piece took us in yet another direction, making use of call and response between us and the dancers. The call and response in this case had a different element to what we as musicians are used to, in that the call was musical and the response was body movement. This concept proved tricky at first as the body movement produced little no sound, making it hard to keep the rhythmic phrasing steady and even. Eventually we found a good pace and slowly added in more elements as the section went on building an understated crescendo to finish the piece of nicely.

Friday 17th June 2011

Up, up and away! Today was the Firebird Trust’s annual away day, a day that proved to be both fun and at times taxing. The morning started with a general meet & greet session, aided by copious amounts of free coffee and tea, this was a chance for everyone to have a chat with each other and get acquainted…the usual pre-meeting shuffle.

The first task(s) of the day was provided by Dave ‘Stickman’ Higgins and opened with a body-percussion, something to fire up our creative juices. Dave’s next task for us was called the “proverbs game” in which we were put into pairs and asked to write down a proverb or saying that stuck in our mind. Once we had the proverbs written down they were written up on the flip chart and we took it in turns to explain what the proverb meant to us and how it could be applied Firebird’s ethos, this was an interesting task and got us thinking about how we and others view the values of the trust.

Next up was Jo Freya with a visualisation exercise. For this we were all asked to write down five core values on cards that we felt we important to the trust, that done the cards were laid out on the table and had five minutes to walk around the table and choose three cards that anybody had written that we felt spoke to us. After this the cards were chosen were collected up and laid out in a group, we were then given a further five minutes to read the cards and turn over any that were didn’t agree or required clarification on. Once this process was finished we were left a set of core values that everyone agreed upon, allowing us to visualise what the trust is to us as a collective.

Mind-mapping was the next activity of the day, another exercise lead by Dave. For this we were split into groups of four, the important factor being that the groups were made up of people who had not or would not normally have worked with. The basic aim of this task was to think about where we saw Firebird in five years’ time and built upon the previous task of establishing core beliefs. The product of this exercise took the form or a mind-map with “The Firebird Trust” in the centre and anything from core-values, working environment to services and even slogan branching off from this. Once our mind-maps were complete we shared them with the group, I found this very interesting indeed as it presented many aspects of the trust that I hadn’t even thought about before such as company structure, physical and online formats and geographical area.

After a superb lunch, we knuckled down to some very thorough discussion and evaluation based on the wealth of material we generated in the morning session. The discussion consisted of a lot of toing and froing, a room full of creatively inclined people is always going to bring up conflicting view points and preferred methods of doing things. The problem with coming up with a plan for five years’ time is that no-one can see into the future, there so many variables to take into account that any concrete plan we could come up with could be irrelevant into two years’ time. That’s not to say it’s worthless thinking about these things, indeed by early evening we managed to come to a consensus of sorts, but a lot of loose ends still lay bare, something no doubt that will be brought together as we’ve had more time to reflect.

Tuesday 21st June 2011

Junk percussion! The art of bashing on random items in a musical manner. Today Peter and I spent the morning perusing the shops of Lincoln for household items to make music with, something I can’t say I’ve done before but never-the-less was more than happy to do. Never had I thought there were so many objects for sale in town that you could make music with! The morning started on Burton Road at the Countdown shop, here we had to figure how to establish the musical potential of items on sale without looking…well, mad frankly. Here we found only two items of worth, a plant pot and washing up bowl, neither of which were all that good. Pound land was our next stop and it proved to be a treasure trove of musical goodness, here we found some very nice sounding enamel camping sets made up of; cup, saucer and bowl, these objects had a very nice metallic tone to them, capable of producing some rather pleasant harmonics. Amongst the other items that took our fancy were; wooden coat-hangers, blue buckets, plastic plates, tuppawear containers, stainless steel bowls and a tin money box to name but a few. At this point we lost all inhibitions about playing the well-kept stock of Lincoln’s shop, even finding time to jam to the in-store music, much to our own enjoyment.

Afternoon meant office time, here we collated the list of objects were deemed to be musical enough and started to think about how we could use these items in conjunction with each other. We decided by the end of the afternoon that themes would serve us well, including; kitchen, bathroom and the garden. We look very much forward to developing a workshop plan around these items, the hard part is going to be convincing the trust to “fork” out for all of these wonderful items….who knows?

Check out the latest from our ongoing colloaboration:

And our evaluation of the session:

And a round up of the past two weeks:

 

The Firebird Trust
The Stables, Wellingore Hall
Wellingore
Lincoln
England
LN5 0HX 

01522 811229

To find out more about the trust, please visit our homepage!