Monday 18th - Thursday 21st April 2011

Monday 18th April 2011

Monday, as has been tradition since week two, started with a FBT Staff meeting headed by Kayleigh this week. It was short, sharp and that great time of the week where we and the other staff can see where our place is within the team, good stuff.

Once our meeting was over we discussed and shared the results of our ‘environment scanning’ with Liam, Robin (communications officer) and Ross (administrative assistant and all things arty!) as we felt and feel that it’s important to ensure that everyone at FBT are aware of our identity and what sets us apart from other organisations that are out there. It was interesting to hear how Robin, Ross and Liam viewed the organisation and to get their take on what we the trust do and how we could go about doing what we do in a unique way.

Tied in with our environment scanning was the subject of collaboration between organisations, sharing an office with ‘Lincolnshire Dance’ we spend a large amount of our office time with their staff and Keyna was kind enough to join us and share her views not only on collaboration but about the way the organisation is managed and its preferred methods of work and publicity.

Tuesday 19th April 2011

This particular day marked the end of the B.G. (Before Gamelan) era of my life, having seen videos and even hefted pieces of the Gamelan into a van…glamorous right? I’d never actually had the opportunity to play one so this was an experience I had been looking forward to for a while.

Our session started with Simon (executive director) introducing the Gamelan to us. As someone who has studied the Gamelan in Indonesia Simon is well versed in the tradition and gave us a brief explanation of the different styles, instruments and a general background. After our introduction to the set we were taught the basic playing technique for each of the instruments in the set and went through a counting method used in order to conduct the piece which leads us into playing a basic traditional Javanese piece. I found this a very rewarding experience, having always had an interest in music with deep rooted histories it added a certain gravitas to the piece we were playing.

Now that we had all got to grips with the basics we set free into full Gamelan flow, improvising what turned out to be a very pleasant piece of music; this is where it became apparent that the Gamelan, despite its complex appearance, is actually an extremely accessible way of making music.

Tuesday afternoon saw Pete and I get involved in some workshop leading and teaching methodology. Our first exercise as set by Liam was to devise a simple a musical pattern using a part of Gamelan of our choice and to then teach that pattern individually to three participants with little to no music experience. During this process we took note of which methods of explanation were working and which ones were not as well as taking note of how our teaching method evolved through the process.

The next task we were given was to facilitate a free-jam with the participants, a simple sounding proposition but surprisingly difficult to execute. Facilitating this jam was involved process needing us to think about what we wanted to achieve musically and how to explain what we wanted each participant to do in the simplest terms; one of the most difficult aspects of this was shaping the piece as it went along and drawing the piece to a conclusion.

The tones of the jam now faded, we moved onto transferring concepts from our body percussion workshop onto the Gamelan.We found that on the whole our exercises were transferrable to a different medium, a reassuring result given the multitude of venues and differing resources available to them in which we will be carrying out our workshops. To add to the ideas that Pete and I had, Kayleigh (Administrator) walked us through a workshop exercise of her own which gave us a fresh take on how to deliver our content and a great insight into her take on dealing with particpants. After this, more handy tips from Liam, who led us through a few exercises of his own including a very useful little method for starting and stopping exercises, following on from this was Liam’s magical musical tale of Dr Daniel Grimley and Dr David Matless which provided much amusement.

All the work for the day done we packed up the Gamelan and headed home reflecting on the experience and devising ways and ideas that we could use the Gamelan for our workshops. The verdict? A very informative and fun day!  

Wednesday 20th April

Practical Wednesday! A day that both of us look forward to as it involves copious amounts of tea, bizarre home-made instruments, banter with spoon-master Tim and of course some good ol’ fashioned hard work.

For our morning portion at Liam’s we sat down and reflected on the previous day with the Gamelan. Accessibility was the keyword of our discussion, concluding that the Gamelan provides an extremely useful tool for getting people with no experience in music participating in the music making and performing process. Key to this is the intrinsic use of number sequences which allow the music to be communicated without using specialist terminology, in other words; a way in which everybody can understand....even drummers! 

The kind of accessibility that the Gamelan provides means that the musical rewards are high whilst the intellectual effort required is low thus meaning most people can be included no matter what ability range they fall into in a broader sense. As well as discussing the merits of the Gamelan in terms of inclusion, we also discussed a possible collaboration with the FBT team and my band ‘The Treehouse’ with an aim to creating a contemporary piece of music and exploring what can be done with the Gamelan, we shall see.

The afternoon at Liam’s saw Pete and I re-work elements of workshop pt.1, creating an entire new exercise based of the number system used in Gamelan, adding to our repertoire and ensuring an open book of options. As mentioned in last week’s diary entry, the next phase of our workshop is to introduce the use of drumsticks. To get the ball rolling we first explored of the possible sounds that could be made using the sticks in conjunction with themselves and other items, this roughly broke down into three areas: stick on stick, sticks + stomping and stick(s) on surface.

After establishing the sounds we wanted to use we then went about devising some basic exercises in which we could use these sounds. The conclusion to our afternoon saw some work on how best to deliver the exercises and key phrases to use when explaining the exercises to participants. The end result of the afternoon was a rough form of workshop pt.2 almost ready for testing; having learnt from our experiences with workshop pt.1 the process of devising this new section came much easier to us and was done in more efficient manner.

Summary of the week

Week five proved once more to be a productive week, very much a practical one too. After focusing on delivery methods and evaluating these methods last week we were able to develop our new much faster. This development was aided by the experiences we had with the Gamelan on Tuesday, providing us with fresh ideas, a fresh approach and a fresh medium. It feels like our workshop is now taking on momentum and we look forward to bringing the workshop into the public domain very soon.

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England
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