Monday 23rd - Thursday 26th May 2011

Monday 23rd May 2011

This week at The Firebird Trust has been one of the slower weeks we’ve experienced so as much as I’d love to recount and epic tale of adventure and merriment, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you disappointed. Monday started, as ever, with the FBT staff meeting, business as usual and not much to report on this front really. Aside from a spot of web related talk, helping Robin with the Tumblr site, we took part in individual feedback sessions with Liam; reflecting on all the work we’ve done so far at the trust, what we’ve liked, what we’ve disliked and what we’d like to do in the future. In terms of future work we all agreed that developing the musician/dancer improvisation workshop is a definite goer and that we’d like to carry on developing a solid relationship with the after school club in Binbrook, both of which you can read about in previous blog entries.

On Monday afternoon the dream team was split! Pete stayed at the office while I went to Welbourn to shadow Tim Walker’s guitar lessons as did Pete two weeks previously. The sessions were individual twenty minute sessions, very different to the multiple participant, half-hour to fourty-five minute sessions we’ve been used to observing. In principle Tim’s way of working was no different to the larger sessions, the essence of this being to convey your knowledge in the simplest and clearest of terms. As I often mention, observing the teaching process in these sessions gives one a great insight into the psychology of working with children, a point that was reiterated in my mind was that of giving your participants choice in what they want to explore as it gives them a sense of ownership over what they are doing.

Tuesday 24th May 2011

Web design again….yes! This is becoming somewhat of a recurring theme but it’s one that is important non-the-less. Today’s mini web task was to produce mock-ups for the layout of individual pages within the website, specifically the ‘about us’ and ‘contacts’ page, along with this we were also asked to think about the content we would want to see included on these pages. 

For the latter half the day we embarked on a new practical concept at Liam’s ‘gaff’ as he now likes to call it. Although we’ve mentioned the use of words, phrases in creating music before, it’s not something we’ve looked at in any real depth. With a set of “magnetic fridge poetry we set to work creating some phrases…some sensible and some not so sensible. Once we had our selection of phrases we set about exploring the different ways in which we could read them out, essentially creating character voices. The reasoning behind us doing this was to explore ways in which people can disassociate performance from their own persona, thus leaving any of their personal insecurities behind.

Wednesday 25th May 2011

Today we became postmen. Yes, you read correctly. As part of Liams varying work in the community, he, Frances, Annie and Tim Walker are holding a family ceilidh in Welbourn over 28^th and 29^th of May (the upcoming weekend) as we are going to be helping out at this event we spent the latter part of the morning delivering flyers to pretty much every house in the village, hopefully it shall be a well-attended event!

Wednesday afternoon entailed a continuation of the previous day’s practical work using words and phrases to create music. Having had a night to mull over ideas a few possibilities arose, the most basic idea; create a phrase and then play rhythms to the syllables. This has an advantage in that the phrase doesn’t have to make any sense at all and relies on the rhythm of the words rather than their meaning. One of the more involved ideas that arose involved more in the way of story-telling. The basic premise of this exercise would be to create phrases and sentences based around a theme or story, the story would then be read and a soundscape created to go along with it. The great advantage of this exercise is that it doesn’t have to involve and kind of structured music, rather the focus is on creating sounds or noises that convey the content of mood of the story as it develops.

Summary

As stated at the beginning of the blog, this was one of slower weeks for us here at the trust. This said we did make progress, finding a new avenue of exploration for our workshops, as well gaining and insight into one-on-one teaching and the implications pertaining to it. We also did our bit to help the community, spreading the awareness of music and dance based family activities in Welbourn. As ever a great 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 16th May 2011 - Wednesday 18th May 2011

Monday 16th May 2011

Welcome one and all to the fourth instalment of the FBT blog. This week has been one of the more varied weeks we’ve had here at the trust and it all started for us on Monday…as you’d probably expect. The ‘Artists Association’ or A.A. (not that A.A.) is a collective made up of the various freelance musicians who work with the trust, from time to time meetings are held to discuss all manner of issues and this particular Monday was one them.

Although Pete and I are not part of the A.A. we were invited along to the meeting to get an insight into how the association works and to get a chance to meet the other Firebird artists. In attendance at this meeting were; Liam Robinson, Dave ‘Stickman’ Higgins, Rikki Thomas Martinez, Daniel King, Jo Freya, Peng Ling, Nigel Minton, Shirley Novak, Beth Noble (Arts Council) and of course our very own Kayleigh Glasper and Simon Steptoe. With a room full of different characters there were a lot of points of view to be heard and varied, colourful discussion on all manner of topics pertaining to the trust. One of the big topics was ‘how to publicise The Firebird Trust’, this topic occupied the whole of the afternoon session and provided us with some great ideas. 

Tuesday 17th May 2011

And turn! and step! and…dancers ahoy!

Tuesday was an exciting day for us and one that provided us with the basis for a potentially exciting project.  As has been mentioned we share an office with Lincolnshire Dance and talked about the possibility of cross organisation collaboration and this particular day we got that chance.

The aim of our session was to explore the world of improvisation, expand our creative outlook and to create something new. We started off the session by getting to understand a little bit of what each other does; this involved trading basic warm-ups, musical and dance. This exercise proved to be a great ice breaker and got our minds thinking about how we convey what we do to others.

The second of our exercises took the form of a free improvisation. With a variety of percussion, Pete and I improvised rhythms, to which the dancers reacted to and vice versa we to them. The result of this was a piece that was led by both the music and dance in duality. Our third exercise involved more in the way of premeditation; Pete, Liam and I created a short three section piece whilst at the other end of the room the dancers created a short piece of their own. This was brought together, the dancers having to create a dance to our short piece and us to create a musical accompaniment to their dance piece.

The whole process was a lengthy one, but one worth doing as we learned a lot about each other’s art-forms. From our point of the view the entire creative approach had to be evolved and changed as we were no longer reacting to familiar musical cues, rather we were reacting to visual cues that were new to us. The same was true for the dancers and we all came to the conclusion that the process we explored was and extremely important one and one that more musicians and dancers need to experience. In short we hit upon, to our knowledge, something that hasn’t been done before and develop and entirely new way of creating art and most importantly managed to unify the two art forms.

Wednesday 18th May 2011

The random form of the week was continued in good fashion; Monday meeting to improve on Tuesday and finally to web-design and drumset tuition. As part of the trusts revamp and reinvigoration the online communication streams are being redesigned. As part of this Simon tasked us with creating mock-ups for the new website and Tumblr site, encouraging us to put our own creative spin on things. Several designs were produced in a very basic form ready to be given to Ross to bring them to life.

The evening involved yet another change of tack and saw us conducting our first session of drumset tuition. Pete and I both being drummers, we’ve been eager to share our expertise for a while now and chance to do so was a very welcome one. Our star student for the night was Jared Walker son of Tim Walker (whose prowess with the spoons has been mentioned here before), to start the session we talked about mind-set, being sure to impress the notion that learning drums is not a race and that patience is a virtue. After the pep talk we moved on to hand technique, demonstrating correct grip and how to execute strokes properly, the aim of this to promote good habits and to prevent injury. The next stage of our lesson was to get Jared playing a basic back-beat groove, we broke this down in to simple steps, allowing him to get used to each element of the groove and three-way co-ordination. This method proved to be extremely effective, within twenty minutes Jared was able to play the basic groove and felt comfortable in doing so. Jared’s progress took both Pete and I by surprise and allowed us to move up a gear and add extra elements into the basic groove, again this was a success and we decided to end on that high.

Summary

This week was a week of variance. We experience the thrills and spills of an Artists Association meeting, explored creative processes between music and dance, delved into the world of web design and conducted our first drum lesson. All of the above experiences were extremely valuable to what we do, but the highlight of the week was definitely teaching drums to Jared as it reaffirmed within ourselves that we're on the right track.

A job well done!

Don't forget to check out our video blog!: 

And also a brief glimpse at Tuesday's session:

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 9th May – Thursday 12th May 2011

Monday 9th May 2011

If you’ve been reading this blog from the start you’ll know by now that Mondays start with our staff meeting, all was good and no-one got injured! Hooray! In fact Monday included a double dose of meetings as Jo Freya; project director of Komposit, came to the office to brief us on the next day’s activities in helping to publicise the Komposit project. During this meeting we were given a background on Komposit and had the chance to ask Jo any questions we had pertaining to it.

Monday afternoon was a quiet one, as Pete was at Welbourne Primary showing Tim Walker’s guitar tuition. Back at the office Liam and I spent some time researching junk-percussion in its various forms, from ensembles to solo performers. After watching various videos on Youtube we came to the joint conclusion that simplicity is the key and that getting mileage out of basic pieces of equipment is the way forward. As well as junk percussion we also researched various instruments we could use in our workshops, again, opting for simplicity taking favour with hand bells and Boomwhackers; very basic instruments with both percussive and tonal qualities.

Tuesday 10th May 2011

All hands on deck!

A day that had been anticipated for the past couple of weeks, this particular Tuesday was a long, busy and important one for us here at FBT. The ‘Composer Platforms’ is a new initiative by Komposit and aims to showcase the composers that have been part of Komposit and their work independently post-Komposit. This particular event showcased Dr Charles Tebbs, a fantastic pianist and composer at the Derby Assembly Rooms lobby area prior and after the performance in the “Great Hall” by the world renowned ‘Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra’.

Being a high profile event the night proved to be a fantastic opportunity not only to showcase Dr Tebbs’ work, but also to promote and publicise the work of FBT and Komposit. Our work in promoting the trust involved us handing out leaflets on Komposit and talking to the general public about the work that the trust does, an experience that at first was quite uncomfortable for us, working out the best way in which to approach people. After a half an hour of leafleting and promoting we went into the hall to watch the Bolshoi’s performance, which was in short inspiring and brand new experience for Pete and I, it’s both damning and inspiring to witness musicianship of such high calibre…but more of the latter! Better get working on my French-grip then!

After the performance there was another set from Dr Tebbs, the audience definitely more a captive one, we stood one hand to answer any questions that the public had about Komposit and the trust although most people talked to us and taken leaflets during the first session. The entire day was great day, not only for the promotional work we got done, but for bonding as a team. Pete, Robin, Ross, Kayleigh and myself travelled down together to Derby (courtesy of Kayleigh) and had some great banter on the journeys to and from and in Derby itself. Working together on one task was a great experience too, given that we’re all from different backgrounds; music, graphic design and even paleobiology…it was a task that didn’t pertain particularly to any one of our specialist areas.

Conclusion? A job well done!

Wednesday 11^th May 2011

Today we had our usual practical tomfoolery at Liam’s house, we started off by reflecting on last week’s experiences in Binbrook and the previous night’s work in Derby, as an added special Liam had a surprise celebrity guest for us in the form of U.S. folk artists Jeff Warner. Jeff shared with us his experience and values in making music with traditional instruments and impressed upon the importance of making sure that it’s kept simple and that everyone can get involved in the music making process.

The evening took us to Binbrook, as has been the case for the past few weeks. Tonight’s session was a short one lead by Firebird musician; Gary Hammond and gave us the opportunity to observe his approach to working with younger people. Based around percussion instruments; Conga, Djembe, Cajon, etc. Gary used words and phrases to teach the participants basic rhythms on the instruments, a method that we have looked at before and would like to include into our own workshops. Observing Gary’s workshop also taught us a lot about instructing and directing workshop participants and the importance of setting out clear signals for starting and stopping the group playing, something that thus far we’ve been less than successful at. After the workshop was finished we joined Gary outside and talked about our observations of the way he works, what we can take away from it and gained Gary’s own insights into work-shopping and how best to handle different situations. As usual a valuable learning experience.

  

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!

Tuesday 26th April - Thursday 5th May 2011

Tuesday 26th April 2011
With the hoo-hah of the royal wedding and refreshingly sparse Mondays, the past two weeks at FBT has been rather slow, however, the four days in which we’ve worked have been very productive.

The morning started as they usually do with a morning of discussion, the main theme of this discussion was that of child protection. Doing workshops with children there are a number of special considerations that must be considered, paramount is that of ensuring that the children do not sustain injury whilst participating in the workshop whilst not stifling the creativity and reach of the activities.

The afternoon entailed research; we were both tasked on researching the members of the ‘Artists Association’ in order to create small biographicals about the artists that work with the trust for the FBT website.

Wednesday 27th April 2011
If you have been reading this diary regularly (I say regular…all two entries) then you’ll know that Wednesday is practical day. With a late start to the day we spent the first half of the afternoon solidifying the ideas we were to take to Binbrook’s youth night later that day. This involved taking some of our basic drum stick ideas and pre-empting the varied age range of our participants and how best to include people of differing ages and abilities.

Late afternoon involved a trip to the ‘Healthy Hub’ to assist our office partners ‘Lincolnshire Dance’ (LD) at the press launch for their “Dance for Life” initiative. The event was quite interesting and was a good insight into the work that LD does and the public face of the organisation, as well as a live demonstration of a typical dance workshop. This event provided us with our own ideas (albeit abstract) on how we would organise and hold a press/public relations event, something to consider for the future.

The evening brought with it the aforementioned workshop at Binbrook. This was the first time Pete and I had led a workshop of our own and it was a nerve wracking as well a useful learning tool. As the children were of different age ranges and abilities we chose to do a drums stick workshop that would be suited to this criteria. Being new comers to the youth club, we found that the children were reluctant to engage at first with the workshop we were presenting. But as time went on they became a lot more receptive and by the end of the session were comfortable with us being there.

The majority of our first workshop saw assistance from Liam, being a familiar face and also more experienced in workshop leading, he put his spin on our content and generated new ideas for us on the spot as well as offering advice and demonstrating ways of working with the children. The session proved to be a fun one, an hour and a half passing by in seemingly minutes and by the end of the session it was clear to see that the children had enjoyed themselves and learnt something in the process. 

Tuesday 3rd May 2011
Environment scanning returns!

Top of the list for this particular Tuesday was researching ‘Do Something’ an organisation in the U.S. involved in all manner of causes, more specifically to get young people involved. Do Something’s tag line is “using the power of online to get teens to do good stuff offline”, in essence they’re an enabler; providing funding and information  for young people who want to set up clubs/groups to raise awareness of and tackle any cause they wish. It’s an extremely different way of working to Firebird but provides some good ideas all the same, the element of teaching people how to run their own workshops or being an enabler would be a great way to get a long term benefit out of short term schemes that the trust may have.

As well as researching Do Something we also research Norfolk based “Community Music East” (CME). CME are in many ways very similar to The Firebird Trust but are a much larger organisation with bigger initiatives, maybe slightly exclusive to the community at large in some cases, focused mainly around young people. In any case it reaffirmed within us, the importance of inclusion.

Wednesday 4th May 2011
Wednesday found us in Binbrook for our second night. Having been introduced to the children the previous week we went in with bags of confidence, comfortable with the people and the environment. Taking things up a notch each time is a phrase we’ve been accustomed to and this time round we came armed with some basic percussion instruments, hoping to build upon what we did the previous week.

In reality the instruments proved to cause more confusion than they did anything constructive. Although they  were happy enough playing with the instruments on their own and “making noise” (which is all good fun in its own right), when it came to orchestrating a piece with multiple patterns playing against each other timing proved to be the big issue. Maintaining a steady pulse amongst everyone was very hard work as each individual needed to be kept in time by myself, Pete or Liam and with a group of ten or more this proved to be an impossibility. This, however, is no reflection on the children, rather a reflection on our expectations of the group and part of our learning process in fathoming what works best with that particular group.

To salvage the situation that had arisen we went back to the very basics…body percussion! This format seemed to work great, the children being able to replicate almost all the rhythms we gave them and also showing us their own rhythms. An off the cuff body percussion solo from Pete served to excite and inspire the group even more and the session ended on a high.

Summary
To summarise; the past two weeks have been both relaxed and intense. We carried out more research and environment scanning to aid our understanding of the trust and to generate new ideas. At Binbrook we further developed our skills as workshop leaders and gained more insight into how people of different ages and abilities react to the workshop content we’ve generated so far. Another productive 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!