Firebird Trust: Music Practitioner Diary: Monday 13th

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: