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!



Monday 6th - Thursday 9th June 2011

Monday 6th June 2011

Yet another manic Monday! Well…not quite. Today was one of the more easy going days we’ve had in recent times and had but one task to occupy our minds; junk percussion research. As has been mentioned many times, Liam is big on the ethos on making music with anything you can. It’s for this reason that an area we want to explore is that of creating music with recycled objects that you’d find during everyday life. Google was our main crutch of the day, looking at and making notes of various web-sites dedicated to the art form.  At times it all felt very ‘Art Attack!” you know? The children's art show with ‘Neil Buchannan’ that used to air in the 1990’s? Nostalgia aside; we found various sites and instructionals for building your own percussion instruments (minus the vast amounts of tissue paper and P.V.A. glue) something that could maybe form part of a longer workshop, whereby we spend a day making instruments then another playing them. It was a good day’s research and certainly provided us with many ideas for the coming months.

Tuesday 7th June 2011

This has been the second week of ‘fending for ourselves’ as Liam has been out on tour and doing various musical activities across the country and thus we have organised out own workload. Not wanting to be stuck in the office for three weeks most of the activities we’ve organised have been on the practical side of the spectrum and today we had the pleasure of working with Mr Gary Hammond; Firebird freelancer and acclaimed percussionist currently part of the duo “The Hut People”. Our day was more or less centred around Redwood Drive Community Hall where we embarked on a day of creative percussion.

After chatting to Gary for a while we got onto the subject of working with dancers, something we’ve been doing more of lately. After our discussion we set ourselves the task to come up with a six-seven minute musical piece to which a dance piece could be set. Working with dancers is something that Gary has a lot of  experience in and before playing a note we discussed the various elements a dance piece should have; light and shade (dynamics), common time, time-signature changes and ‘free-time’; where time signature and tempo are completely disregarded.

The first movement of our piece served as a calm introduction, Pete playing the ‘thunder drum’ and I accompanied this with a slow swung ballad feel using brushes on the snare drum. We found that this worked extremely well as an intro; the soundscape aspect of the thunder drum creating tension, whilst the introduction of brush strokes on the snare added softness and a slow yet solid time feel.

The second movement of our piece created a change in feel, going from an airy half-time to a more punchy and grooving double-time section. For this, Pete played the ‘log drum’ whilst I multi-tasked, playing snare with a brush in the right hand and ‘yambu drum’ (a hybrid of the conga and cajon) with my left hand. Within in this movement we made use the ‘light & shade ’concept, starting out  at a medium dynamic then bringing it down to the softest and quietest possible volume and back up to a full dynamic. This created a great effect of tension and release and also served to up the pace and mood of the piece.

Our third movement made use of a three-four Waltz feel and another change in dynamic. With a free-time section in mind towards the back-end of the piece we felt that a smooth and gradual transition was needed to take it from a solid to sparse feel. In this section I played time on the triangle, accenting the “one” of every bar whilst Pete improvised various pattern using a pair of ‘caxixi’. The choice in instruments was key to this section of the piece; the triangle being a very delicate yet solid sounding instrument and the caxixi having a full yet textural sound. This combination of instruments allowed us to create an airy mood, whilst maintaining a solid sense of time.

Carrying on with the theme from our previous movement, this fourth movement descended the piece into total soundscape, with no fixed reference of time. Our instruments for this section were; buzz bow, ocean drum, klangauge and water-phone, all very ethereal sounding. Rather than count off bars in our head we chose to go by intuition; introducing new sounds as and when the time felt right. The reasoning behind this section of the piece was to create a cushion of sound upon which the dancers will eventually have chance to improvise freely and even give them a chance to lead the dynamic and direction of the piece.

For our final movement we brought the whole piece to a crescendo, creating a dynamic climax and a peak in tempo. After jamming for several minutes (Pete on cajon and myself on snare drum) we stumbled upon a pseudo-Latin feel. Utilising a repeating snappy, syncopated pattern on the snare and a boomy driving  groove on the cajon we tried our best to emulate a ‘Rio Carnival’ feel, a chance for the dancers use fast paced movements and quick changes.

Wednesday 8th May 2011

We had been looking forward to this day for some time now as we were booked in for a day with the legendary Dave ‘Stickman’ Higgins. We met Dave previously at the Artists Association meeting and his zest for life and enthusiasm made a big impression on us, the kind of person you really want to work with. Well today proved to be no let-down, arriving at Dave’s studio he greeted us with the same enthusiasm, thoroughly motivated for an afternoon of creativity. The studio was very impressive! Located on the top floor of a one-hundred and fifty year old clothes factory the whole place was, as Dave said, very reminiscent of the New York studios you see in documentaries and films, tucked away in the most unassuming of places.

Shared with a Cabaret troupe, the space was vibrant and as artsy as you like; stage costumes, drum kits, musical equipment, props, books and all manner of vibrant objects crammed into the space. To begin the session (like any good creative types should) we sat down and had a cup of tea, got to know each other and mused upon whatever subject came to mind, it set the precedent for the day, being spontaneous and wholly organic.

After chatting for a while the inevitable happened when you have three drummers in the room and not one, but two drum-kits set up! Dave played for us a while, all the time sharing with us his personal ethos when it comes to playing the kit. With a very impressive display of dual-snare drum playing and a very groove filled samba it became clear that as with everything Dave really feels what he does on the kit, pure groove. Once Dave had played I hopped onto the kit and played a couple of grooves and explained briefly my approach to playing including the whole ‘lefty on a righty kit’ thing, unfortunately this was interrupted by the annoyed bashes on the wall from the neighbours…so that put an end to that.

Amongst the vast Aladdin’s cave of costumes, instruments and artwork were several of Dave’s visual arts pieces in the form of sculptures made from re-claimed items of all descriptions. One of these pieces was created for the ‘Passport Project’, a project that explored: culture, heritage and identity, Dave talked us through this and explained what the aims of the project were and how they relate to society as a whole. After this we studied the other pieces in the room, Dave explaining the creative process behind them and what they meant to him, as well as getting us to think about what they represented and meant to us.

This proved to ignite a flame, and inspiration struck. Looking at one piece in particular as a trio we started creating verse inspired by the phrase “deep resonance” which appeared at the bottom of the sculpture, with an A2 sheet and felt tip pen at the ready the next hour saw us vibing off each other creating a thirty-three line poem exploring life, religion and politics. Once we had finished our poem, Dave recounted the time he was introduced to Cubist poetry of the 1920’s whereby the poet would create his piece and then create and entirely new piece by writing out the top line then the bottom, second from the top then second from the bottom etc, creating an entirely new arrangement of the verses and a whole new take and depth of the meaning of the piece. We carried out this process with our own poem and yielded a fascinating result; the overall sentiment of the poem remaining the same whilst discovering hidden meanings within the lines.

After reflecting on what we had created we came up with plans to take it to the next level, the idea being to have three drum-kits set up in the room and break the poem up into movements or sections, creating grooves and rhythms to accompany the spoken word delivery of the poem. We all look forward to having this session and can hopefully get it booked sooner rather than later as we all had a great time collaborating as creative people and feel like we created something important, that has to be shared.

Movement five from our dance accompaniment piece (segement):

 

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 30th May - Thursday 2nd June 2011

Tuesday 30th May 2011

All quiet on the western front. What with the bank holiday (yet again) and Liam currently being on tour it’s been quieter than it has been for a while here at Firebird, so do forgive me if this week’s blog is a little thin on the ground. Having got most of our work- load organised for the next couple of weeks without Liam we set about finding venues to actually do the stuff we have planned, this task did and is proving to be hard…we didn’t realise quite how in demand village halls are on a Tuesday but ahh well!

The main feature of our day was drum tuition. As mentioned in our blog on Thursday 19^th May, Pete and I went down to Welbourn to test out our skills as drum teachers using Jared Walker as our guinea pig, well the good news is that he thoroughly enjoyed the lesson and asked us back for more. Jared is exactly what you’d want in a pupil; he has a musical ear, listens, observes carefully, picks up on ideas fast and also practices. Having looked at basic three-way co-ordination in the form of the ‘money beat’ (one and three on the bass drum, two and four on the snare with straight quavers on the hi-hat/ride) and progressed a little further than that in the previous lesson we moved onto some new ideas and concepts.

Drum fills, everyone’s favourite thing in the world right? No? Shush, anyway the main focus of our lesson with Jared was that of breaking up a basic four bar form with a single stroke role on the snare drum, like a pro, Jared took to this as if he’d been playing drums his whole life! Is that my friend envy tapping on my shoulder? In all seriousness the progress made is a testament to Jared as a pupil, and his willingness to develop an understanding of the technique we’ve been teaching and also (not to sound inflated) a testament to our teaching method and ability to put across the material.

Wednesday 31st May 2011

A little over a month ago I described our first encounter with the Gamelan, a very enjoyable and informative experience, so it was with great pleasure that we went back up to minster school to do another session with Simon. The session we did in April was very much focused on just having fun and becoming acquainted with the instruments, today however was a different beast entirely a  “hard-core Gamelan” as Simon put it.

Much like our first session Simon started by teaching us a traditional Javanese piece on the Sarons, this was combined with some pointers on teaching technique, one of the main points being that singing is a very useful tool to engrain patterns in your head. Once we had all the grasped the piece on the Sarons the group was split between several instruments including the Big Gong, Katuk and Bonang. Again Simon demonstrated another method for teaching, relating the roles of the instruments to writing a sentence; the gong being the capital letter and the Katuk being the commas in the sentence, so on and so forth.

After lunch break we resumed activities, this time focusing on the technique involved in playing individual instruments from the set. We were split up and sent to our instrument of choice and given the chance to ‘mess about’ for a while and experiment. During this time Simon went round the group focusing on each individual in turn, this was the highlight of the day for me as Simon has an expert knowledge when it comes to the Gamelan and expanding one’s knowledge on different forms of music is something I’ve always felt strongly about. Kendhang was my weapon of choice and it took me only a short amount of time to realise that I’m not going to be a great player of the instrument anytime soon! I didn’t get much past replicating four basic sounds; danh, tah, den and tung but as with any instrument you need to get the foundation solid and I'm happy with the progress I made over the course of the afternoon. To round the day up we went around the set and showed each other what we had learnt on our chosen instruments and recapped on the day’s event. 

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!