Junk percussion has become an ever increasing theme within our work here at The Firebird Trust and this morning we had a session with Gary to discuss and analyse Pete’s workshop in Hull two weeks ago and also to discuss our planned “Bring Build & Play” sessions that we shall be conducting at Binbrook Activity Night in the coming weeks. Analysing Pete’s workshop was not only useful for him but resulted in us having a clearer plan of how to use junk percussion. The most important lessons we drew from this session were;
-The playing technique for each instrument should be taught in a thorough manner, and used as way to introduce the pattern(s) they will be playing.
-Regardless of instrument, every pattern that you are going to use should be taught to the whole group, regardless of whether they will be playing it or not.
-It’s crucial that all of the patterns relate to each other and form the part of a bigger whole; this gives everyone a common goal to work towards.
-As a leader you need to have an instrument to conduct and maintain control over the group.
A month or so ago I mentioned during a meeting with Peter and Liam that it would be nice to do a project where we build a set instruments with a group and then play them. After some consideration and discussion we all agreed that this would be a fantastic idea to take to the Binbrook Activity Night over the summer holidays for a period of four weeks. Gary’s input on this tied in to the analysis we did of Pete’s workshops with the kitchen equipment, demonstrating how to use syllables effectively to create a rhythmic piece and how to best pace them within the piece. One of the great nuggets of info related to Samba ensembles and the musical cues and breaks they use to switch between movements in the piece.
Tuesday 26th July
The morning was spent in the office today but the afternoon brought with it an interesting meeting with Marion from the arts organisation ‘IMPart’. The open-mic plan that we drew up last week is something we’re keen to get up and running, so today’s meeting with Marion was an opportunity to discuss using IMPart as a venue and providing a young musicians night. It’s nice to be in the company people who care about music and getting the next generation of musicians out there and in the spotlight and this made for a pleasant meeting. With a common goal in hand we discussed the options for our evenings; acoustic or full band? Week-day or weekend? Performance/showcase or mentoring? The most important aim is to give young musicians and forum to share their music, ideas, knowledge and to be able to network, with so much social media via the internet these days and lack of venues for under 16’s to meet it’s hard to really get to know other musicians.
The results of this meeting are yet to be seen, although it was promising. There is certainly food for thought and many things to take into consideration and areas to work out, but it’s something we’d rather do properly than in haste.
Wednesday 27th
A trip down memory lane today, as I dug out my secondary school design & technology skills!
In preparation for the first session in Binbrook next week with the “Bring, Build & Play!” sessions I drew a set of schematics for the instruments we are going to build with the children which include; drainpipe xylophones, parcel tube rain-sticks and soup tine shakers. It was a fun but demanding task, working out increments in size for the xylophone proving to be somewhat of challenge. With a shopping list e-mailed to Liam everything is hand and ready to go.
As part of our work here we’re often asked for consultation on all manners of areas such as marketing, branding, web-design etc. Our task for this particular afternoon was to read over and give feedback on the draft membership agreement for the organisation “Lincolnshire One” which aims to unify arts organisations in Lincolnshire and promote collaboration for the wider benefit of the county. It was an interesting document and set out a nice philosophy, something that appealed to me however we thought it could have done with a little more in the way of concrete facts and the mechanisms involved in the way of working it set out.
The Firebird Trust The Stables, Wellingore Hall Wellingore Lincoln England LN5 0HX
Today found the dream team of myself, Liam and Pete in the office for the day due to Simon and Kayleigh being on FBT business elsewhere. The day was going rather slow until Pete happened upon a fantastic idea whilst making a coffee, why not use the P.A. equipment available to us to host “Firebird Open-Mic Nights”? The latter half of our morning and the most of our afternoon was spent discussing all manner of aspects around the open-mic; age of target audience, venues, format, marketing, potential problems and solutions etc. The upshot of the discussion was that we want to aim these music nights at under 18’s i.e. people who might not necessarily be allowed to play in pubs or licenced venues (where the majority of live music occurs) as we feel this demographic don’t often get the chance to perform publicly. Venue is going to be very important for this project, playing publicly for the first time can be extremely nerve wracking and can put people off performing full-stop. For this reason it is important to find a venue that is public enough to provide good exposure for the young artists, but not be too intimidating that it puts people off. After this discussion we decided to be fantastically annoying to everyone else in the office, taking out all the equipment to create an inventory, all the while in nerdy music gear conversation…musical small talk as Liam calls it.
Tuesday 19th July
With a torrential thirty minute down pour in Lincoln usually leads to the inevitable flash flooding occurred in the Monks around area of town the Croft Street community centre included...and unfortunately this was the case today, receiving a call from Croft Street we were informed the storage room where the other half of the county council’s Gamelan is kept had flooded. With this myself, Robin, Ross, Pete and Kayleigh dropped what we were doing in the office (not literally) and headed down to help move the equipment to a drier location. The roads on the way were terrible, and upon seeing the massive puddle at the centre’s car park we expected the worst. The reality wasn’t quite so dramatic, but considering that most of the Gamelan is made of wood and bronze it was imperative that we get it out of the damp as soon as we could. After half of an hour of hefting, heaving and hauling we had most of the set safe and happy in an upstairs room and so we left Croft Street and our day ended there.
Wednesday 20th July
More office work today, the time being divided up between consolidating our plan for the ‘FBT Open Mic) and planning for our ‘make n’ play’ style junk percussion programme for the Binbrook activity night. Whilst researching junk-percussion earlier in the month we stumbled upon a number of tutorials on how to build your own junk instruments. This set the cogs turning and we realised it’d great to put together a programme lasting over the summer holidays where we build instruments with the children at Binbrook activity night and create a performance piece so show to the staff and parents at the end of the holiday. Gary shall be coming in next week to help with the final planning and details and from there it will just be a case of acquiring materials to make stuff with.
Good headway was made on the open-mic proposition today, and after a chat with Marion Sander from IMPart a meeting has been set-up for next Tuesday to discuss the possibility of putting on a regular young musician’s night for them. The next stage is going be figuring out our marketing strategy; where and how to advertise, with the schools closed for the summer we have the challenge of finding an effective place to market towards our target audience, something that we’ll no doubt overcome!
For the evening I went to ‘Binbrook Activity Night’ solo (kindly aided by Liam giving me a lift there and back) as Pete was off rehearsing and doing musiciany type things. This provided me a great opportunity to not only to get more experience of doing music workshops on my own, but also to explore the connection built up with the children who regularly partake when Pete and I lead workshops there. Going in with an aim isn’t always the best thing to do but tonight I wanted to set myself a challenge and that was to get all of the children playing in time with each other and to a steady tempo. To do this I started out by just talking to the children about what words they associated with drumming and percussion, after many answers the word “timing” came up. Firmly yet not forcefully I impressed upon them the importance of staying in time and invited them to take up the challenge of holding a good steady rhythm. This process took some work, realising that they I hadn’t mentioned the key thing “listening and feeling” I got everyone to close they eyes and really listen to what they were doing and what everyone else was doing, once they were in time we stayed on the beat then asked them to remember that feeling . Going through this process seemed to make something click; previously we’ve had a battle at times to keep control of everything, but tonight it all worked. By the end of the session we migrated from using just sticks to sticks on washing up bowls, playing a game of pass the rhythm and letting the children explore their own rhythmic ideas too…by the end it was me who was being taught! After a good fourty minutes the session ended with my aim reached and exceeded, proof that sometimes you just to have a little bit of determination and a way of getting things across.
The Firebird Trust The Stables, Wellingore Hall Wellingore Lincoln England LN5 0HX
Today, as with all Monday’s was our office day and on today’s agenda was more marketing. During the morning we set about analysing The Firebird Trust’s promotion via the medium of flyers, the objective to identify what we liked about it and what we change about it, all from a personal view point. Content of the flyers was also scrutinised, ascertaining what information we felt as a group was relevant and how much content we felt was needed. The general consensus from this was that the content needed to be more concise and descriptive of the trust as a whole, rather than going to detail of every project and aspect. We also agreed that the colour scheme for the flyers could be a lot more vibrant…not in a garish way, but in a way that will catch the eye in a pleasant manner.
Later on during our session we took a look at web-site designs and how various companies/artists brand themselves. The main aspect of this was analysing how these companies and artists conveyed what they do to the public and how we could apply this to our branding overall, with five very different people the opinions varied wildly, but all in all it was still a very useful exercise.
Tuesday 12th July
For dancers it’s “five, six, seven, eight!” for musicians it’s “one, two, three, four!” either way there was a fair amount of counting in today as this was a final rehearsal with Fiona and Naledi for our final performance/music & dance taster workshop at Dance Box next Monday.
As has been documented on this blog we have been exploring the world of creative collaboration between dancers and musicians and as part of this have been creating and refining a performance piece. With a solid structure and with an interesting piece at hand, today’s session involved repeating the piece over and over to make sure that the execution is as a tight as possible. The session went extremely well and has left us extremely confident that we can put on a good performance.
Wednesday 13th July
To start off today’s entry I’m going to take a quote from the very first FBT Diary post;
“Judgement day! Wednesday was in all honesty the day I was dreading/excited about the most, for this was the first time we were to unleash our workshop on real people!”
So! At the time, the prospect of testing out our workshop for the very first time was rather daunting, well; now that I look back I wonder what all the fuss was about as today was all in all far more terrifying, exciting and revealing. Today we embarked on our final trip to Tilbury Primary school in Hessle and after observing Liam and Gary do their thing for the last two trips, it was now our turn to deliver workshops to the year one and year two classes.
With two very different plans in hand, mine based on body-percussion and Pete’s based on junk-percussion we set about making noise. The ease the kids into the afternoons activities we decided it best that I take the first twenty minute session and Pete to take the latter twenty minutes. For the whole day I had been extremely nervous about doing my first school workshop and indeed up until the last minute before I was “on” I was a bag of nerves, but with a sudden surge of confidence I took hold of the situation and had fun. Both classes were fantastic, being; attentive, polite, engaged and enthusiastic about the activities. At first I was worried that my workshop was going to be too basic and not hold their attention, heaven forbid! Even bore them! The opposite was quite true in the end; with a room full of smiling faces and the sound of joyous laughter I felt great and somewhat relieved. Pete’s junk-percussion workshop went down a treat too, a very noisy affair but all the same fun to watch and although the children didn’t hold many of the rhythms they were taught, they all had a lot of fun and that’s the most important thing.
The most interesting aspect for me during the day was working with children who are hard-of-hearing. After watching Gary successfully involve them in his workshop I was determined to get them involved. Interestingly enough they were able to hold a beat a much better than a lot of the other children, mirroring my counting movements almost to the millisecond.
Liam and Gary both observed us during our workshops and gave us a full evaluation of our work. This was a great eye opener, making us both aware of aspects of our delivery that were weren’t even aware of. Being able to have your work analysed by two experts is something you don’t often get the chance to do, and the pointers that were given were duly noted and will be implemented into our working practice.
A fantastic day all in all!
The Firebird Trust The Stables, Wellingore Hall Wellingore Lincoln England LN5 0HX
For these two days we took part in some rather interesting training focused around the use of technology in music workshops under the expert guidance of Shirley Novak. During Sunday's session we took a look at various pieces of Mac software that can be used in a creative way these included: i-movie, White-cap and Garage Band as well as the i-phone app "Bloom". The software that interested me the most from this was "White-cap"; a piece of software that creates randomized visualisations in reaction to sound and in effect, can be used to help people "see" the sound they're creating. This has great benefits for the hard of hearing as it allows them to see the effect of the sounds they produce, even though they may not be fully audible to themselves, thus allowing them to be part of creative musical activities. Garage Band was the main piece of software we focused on during the session, a simple yet effective piece of software for creating music using loops. As well as having a large library of loops comprising of various instruments and styles you can very easily record your own loops in using either the internal laptop/computer microphone or an external mic. Away from the Mac we had a look at a rather intriguing item called "Sound Wave". Sound Wave is a MIDI based system which uses infra-red as means of MIDI controller. The pitch of the music reacts to the distance between a surface and the aperture of the controller, clickable pads also allow you to trigger extra sounds or to simple cycle through them. Invented by and for dancers this system provides a rather novel way of creating music.
On Monday we got to see Shirley and the technology in action at Lincoln Minster School during a day of workshops with year; 9, 8 and 6 students. The workshops consisted of the same programme for all years groups; starting with a brief introduction of herself and background and a quick walk through of the equipment and how music and recording technology has changed from an analogue to digital format and the possibilities this presents.
After the introduction Shirley demonstrated White Cap, getting the students to shout out their name and see what it looked like through the visualiser, this proved to be a fun exercise encouraging many a silly noise. After some fun with White Cap Shirley went to explore the relationship between music and emotion and how we perceive visual media with different kinds of music. To do this an excerpt from the film “Out of Africa” was played firstly with the original score by John Barry, the students were asked to come up with words that described the emotions that the film and music portrayed and this produced words such as; thoughtful, sorrowful and relaxed. The excerpt was then played again but with a dance tune called “Take me to the Clouds Above”, a much more upbeat song, when asked for words to describe the film there was a complete change in the way it was interpreted, with words like; fun, bouncy and exhilarating being used.
The main bulk of Shirley’s workshop was the use of Garage Band, and getting the students involved in the creative process of making music. First off, the basic features of the software and processes were demonstrated, the advantage being that the software is extremely easy to use. After this brief tutorial the students went about creating a song; starting with a drum track then a bass-line, guitar, piano etc. Although it may seem simplistic to use samples to create music this is not the case, a major feature of this part of the workshop was about choosing samples that worked stylistically well together and ensuring that the samples were moved into the correct key, for example a bass line in G#Maj wouldn’t sound good with a Guitar part in Dm, so it was up to the students to move the instrument they saw fit. After creating their backing tracks the students were given a chance to record parts on their track live using the inbuilt microphone on the i-Mac, these recording were then spliced and turned into samples and loops, in some cases the entire drum beat was made up of vocal samples.
Watching this workshop and learning about Shirley’s methods gave a great insight into an avenue of music workshops that you don’t often hear of or see, although expensive in terms of gear it makes for an extremely effective method of getting people involved in creating music. With more and more people using computer technology to create music it is apparent that this kind of workshop can give people something they can relate to and recognise and most importantly can do at home if they have the equipment.
Tuesday 5th July
With a salutary “Up the Mariners!” as left the tool booth at the Humber Bridge; today were back on the north bank in Tilbury (Hessle) to watch Gary Hammond conduct his workshop with the year 1 and year 2 groups. As was discussed in a previous blog, one of Gary’s favourite workshops is that of creating a soundscape for “Going on a Bear Hunt”. With what seemed like several music shops’ worth of percussion items big and small he set-up in the school’s hall and set to work. Watching Gary work was in short inspiring! The children were thoroughly engaged with the story and gave suitable gusto to the parts they played during the song. During the story there are several obstacles that the family have to overcome from tall grass to a snow storm, for each of these obstacles Gary had certain types of percussion to represent them. Certain children played for certain obstacles and this gave each child a certain responsibility to play their part at the correct time and to pay attention to the narrative, or in musical terms; know where their part fit into the form of the piece. Giving the children this responsibility in my opinion was a great as it incorporated a skill that is used in a number of settings and situations in everyday life and as has been said, the idea of doing these workshops is to embed not only musical skills but life skills as well.
This session was particularly interesting as Tilbury Primary is a school that not only caters for the abled but also caters for the hard of hearing; in today’s group there were four children for whom this was the case. It was interesting to see the way that Gary incorporated the children into the piece, using instruments that had a strong visual appeal and moving parts to help them see their part in the story. This attitude is something I feel is very important as Gary didn’t see the hearing problems the children have as an impassable barrier, rather the opposite encouraging them to be involved and making them an integral part of the performance just as every child in the group was.
On the way back to Lincoln we made a quick visit to the youth club at Brookenby next door to Binbrook, indeed Brookenby is a relatively new settlement being developed from the R.A.F. station infrastructure and buildings left after the station closed. We’re hoping to start work with both the junior and senior groups over the summer, probably based on junk-percussion, but this visit was just to say hello and get to know the staff and children who attend the club.
Wednesday 6th July
With our final visit to Tilbury next week and it being our turn to lead workshops we set about putting final preparations to our plans and discussing with Liam exactly what we plan to do. Pete had opted to go with a junk percussion theme, utilising objects that you’d find in the kitchen. After a trip in town Pete came back armed with; washing up bowls, mixing bowls, baking trays, cheese graters and tea-spoons and went about creating a piece that the children could play. Pete’s plan is to create rhythms based off the syllables of the name for each object, very simple to grasp…hopefully. Liam agreed that this would be a good concept and something that if managed right could yield good results.
Having had some rather chaotic experiences with children and instruments I drew up plans for a body percussion workshop. This workshop will involve clapping, stomping and various combinations or the two, as well as some clapping games in circles, something that’s not too hard to grasp but sounds good. Being safe territory (relatively) I feel then when we go to Tilbury I will be able to confidently lead the workshop and get some good results, the end game being to first and foremost enjoy themselves and secondly to play various rhythms in time with each other and gain an appreciation for teamwork and creating music.
For the afternoon we helped Pete prep his kitchen junk percussion, making beaters to play the various instruments using: dowels, napkins and gaffa tape. It didn’t prove to be the greatest example of craftsmanship in the world but was a fun end to the day and indeed the week!
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The Firebird Trust The Stables, Wellingore Hall Wellingore Lincoln England LN5 0HX
