Firebird Trust: Music Practitioner Diary: Monday 16th 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!

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