Who really wrote the Bach cello suites?

I spent this weekend down at ArtPlay, leading the MSO ArtPlay Open Workshops, which take place at the start of every year. These are fast-paced, one-hour composing workshops for children aged 8-13, and we promise parents that when they return to pick up their kids in an hour, we will have a new piece of music to perform for them.

We build the compositions around stories which the children create at the start of the workshop. The stories tend to be larger-than-life and go on remarkable flights of fancy and imagination. This year, aliens and outer space featured prominently. Here are a couple of that ilk:

Bach is sitting at his pianoforte, composing. Suddenly, aliens take over his piano. He realises that it is playing by itself, and he understands the code that the notes are spelling out. The code says, “We come in peace”. However, Bach is not convinced by this declaration of peace; rather, he is freaked out by his piano being taken over by aliens so he burns his piano. His (many) children help him remove the keys and throw them on the fire. Then, the aliens arrive in his house, and explain that they really mean him no harm. What happens next? Do they take over his body? Or do they work side-by-side and co-compose all of Bach’s celebrated works? Just WHO really wrote the cello suites in the end?

We are a band. We are the first band to be invited to play in outer space. We’re going to perform a concert for some NASA astronauts who are sitting in their space station, bored of all their CDs. We’re nervous as the rocket blasts off. We decide to rehearse. But while our clarinettist is putting their instrument together, the bell flies off (zero gravity) and lands in the engine of the rocket. Things get out of control and we crash land on Mars. Some Martians greet us. At first they are not particularly nice, but we play for them and they are so impressed they help us out by zapping us over the NASA space station with their zapping tool.

This particular workshop process has been in place for some time now and is well-honed and very effective. The creative twists of the stories the children invent (and the subsequent music they inspire) are a result of the group creative process, I believe. One idea sparks another, and the stories take on a life of their own, bouyed along by the energy of the group. The questions I ask are deliberately open-ended, aiming to provoke unexpected possibilities. You can read more about the Open Workshop process here (the “Workshop plan for finding bright, sparky kids” – one of my most popular posts), and about some of the stories from last year here. The Open Workshops double as a try-out for the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble program, which brings 28 young players (ages 8-13) and 4 MSO musicians together every school holidays to compose a new piece of music under my direction.

Jamming

A number of years ago now, I developed the ‘jam’ large-scale workshop format. I wanted to create something that could take place in a public space (ie. open to the public), that could cater for all ages and all levels of playing ability, to which anyone could turn up on the day and participate. I particularly wanted it to be the kind of event that whole families – parents, teenagers and children learning to play an instrument, younger siblings who just loved banging things, grandparents – could take part in together rather than the instrument-learning child being dropped off while parents take the younger sibling(s) off for an hour.

Jams have continued to evolve since then and these days it is one of the workshop formats that new clients often ask me to create for them. It has also developed along some different strands – such as the massed music-making scale of the Big Jams I’ve created and co-led for the Melbourne International Jazz Festival the last two years. This clip is from the 2011 Big Jam, co-presented with Rusty Rich (purple suit) and Mal Webb (orange suit). The dress code was ‘colourful’, which I think we acquitted pretty well!

 

Another strand is the ‘Jam on a Classic’, which can involve hundreds (rather than thousands) of participants. This video shows the Jam on The Rite of Spring that I created in 2010. It’s a good example of the way I extract a few ideas and themes from a big orchestral work and use them as the basis for a large group improvisation.

 

The next big jam I’ll be leading is on February 18th at the Myer Music Bowl, a large covered amphitheatre surrounded by grass-covered slopes in the heart of Melbourne. Every February the MSO presents a series of free symphony orchestra concerts at the Bowl and Melburnians pack a picnic and attend in the thousands. This year, I’ve been asked to create a pre-concert jam that will entice the picnickers – parents and children – to examine their picnic baskets for possible soundmakers (cutlery? Salad bowls? Tupperware?) and join in a jam on themes from Aaron Copland’s El Salon Mexico (the first piece that will be performed in that evening’s concert). A team of MSO musicians and young players from the MSO ArtPlay Graduate Ensemble will be on hand to lend support and give us a solid musical foundation to lock into!

Myer Bowl Jam

Saturday 18 February, 5-5.30pm

Followed by a free orchestral concert at 7pm

All welcome!

Learning journeys of young musicians

The first week of September always marks the last get-together of that year’s MSO ArtPlay Ensemble, a group that I direct every school holidays that is made up of 28 young musicians (aged 8-13 when they start, usually 9-14 by this time of year). Each time we meet, we compose a new piece of music using collaborative strategies and improvisation, taking inspiration from a core piece of orchestral repertoire.

Then the last project for the year is over (in this case, Elgar’s Cello Concerto Re-imagined), and I can reflect on the musical and developmental journeys that I’ve seen some of the young participants take.

Sullen violin girl

One girl came to us at the start of the year flanked by her sister and a friend. The three of them took part in the Open Workshops audition with a certain amount of eye-rolling and cynicism. I took a punt on the older of the two sisters being ready to branch out on her own and offered her a place in the ensemble. In the first project, she barely moved her bow. She and another girl, similar in age, joined forces and giggled their way through the project, offering little to the creative process. The musician leading that small group was infuriated.

The next project, we put her in a different group, and her musician leader gave her a lot of musical responsibility. She jollied her along, creating a shorter name for her (in a gesture of jovial friendliness) and insisted, in an encouraging, positive way, that she be the one to play a solo in her group. Sullen Violin Girl was sullen no more after that project.

Fast forward to September and the project we have just completed, and this violinist was a different person to how she’d been at the start of the year. When I asked at one point for volunteers to play a solo – an improvised solo – she was the first to raise her hand. “Great sound!” I enthused at one point, and she happily told the whole group that this was her new instrument. (That’s a topic for a whole other post, the wonderful momentum that cam come when a young player starts to play on a decent instrument). She was obviously very proud, but also so much more confident. Her’s was a very positive journey, from insecure, shy, sullen teenager to someone who was really starting to blossom.

Hard-to-stay-focused boy

This boy was one of the younger members of the group. He’d impressed us all at the auditions with his vibrant imagination. He wasn’t a strong player, but he obviously loved inventing his own music. Once in the large group however, he floundered. He found it difficult to stay on task as long as the others in the group, needed a lot of personalised attention, and would frequently raise his hand to ask when we’d be taking a break.

In the second project it all got too much for him and there were tears. “Just because I’m the youngest doesn’t mean I always have to play the easy stuff,” he wailed. I sat with him and listened, and explained how we were happy for him to make the music harder for himself. If his part was too boring he could change it to make it more challenging. But, I told him, he has to try and do this by himself. His musician-leader would help him, but he’d need to take the initiative. He cheered up with that information, and went off to eat his lunch.

In the September project, he was still energetic and twitchy, but I got the sense that he’d settled into our routine now. When we did body percussion in our warm-ups he didn’t – as in previous warm-ups – start to jitter his feet and legs like an out-of-control Irish dancer, but managed to stay more or less in one place. At one point he came and showed me his bag of rice crackers. “I don’t want to get hungry! I’m always hungry here!” he told me. He still raised his hand and asked for breaks at inopportune moments, but I too had learned how to respond to this, and would tell him he should take a break if he needed one, but that I needed to keep the rehearsal going a bit longer. “Oh… alright then. I’ll stay too,” he said, sighing.

He played a solo, in a section where I had asked each of the soloists to play very slowly. “You could change notes just at the start of each bar,” I suggested. His eyes never left me during that section, waiting for his cue. He played his improvisation just as I’d asked, one note, changing at the start of each bar. Slow and solid. I think he knew how good it sounded.

I didn’t get to catch up with his parents at the end of the project. After the tears in the middle of the year his dad had said, “This is so good for him! Being part of a group, having to work with others… he isn’t good at these things, and he is just getting so much out of it.”

The quiet ones

After the project had ended in September and I was back home, I found myself thinking about the quieter members of the group. They were among the less confident players. One was a cellist, one of the oldest in the group, and quite a beginner. Initially we’d had two older beginner cellist girls in the group (I try to ensure the older kids have someone else their own age in the Ensemble – I can well remember the self-consciousness I felt as a teenager taking part in activities where I seemed to be the oldest and the tallest) but the other girl never came back after the first project. This girl didn’t get to blossom the way the Sullen Violin Girl did. She never put her hand up to play a solo and would shake her head in horror if asked to do so directly. I don’t think she liked playing alongside the other two cellists who were both younger than she.

Two other girls who didn’t ever want to play a solo were sisters. They had learned to play their instruments (piano and violin) in a very stern, traditional, schooled fashion, and the creativity of the Ensemble was a very new experience for them. I think the younger sister got a lot out of it – as a violinist she was often a section player and so not necessarily being asked to invent things for her instrument. The older sister was the main pianist/percussionist in the group, and by September I realised she was not offering her musician-leaders anything. Everything she played was suggested to her by someone else.

In a fast-paced 2-day project like the ArtPlay Ensemble projects, there isn’t a lot of time to coax individuals. You can make suggestions and encourage them to try, but if they don’t respond, time demands that you move on. In this way, I think the project wasn’t as good for some as it was for others. Was it the wrong project for them? Were we wrong to offer a place? Or was there a small sense of hope inside them that something in this project would unlock the kernel of potential that they know is there, but that they cannot voice due to the greater fear of sounding ‘wrong’?

City Beats, part three

Last week saw the third instalment of the MSO/ArtPlay ‘City Beats’ program – two days of workshops with students from four different schools. Working with them over the course of the year is giving us lovely insights into the way they are getting comfortable with the musical processes we’re using, and with the MSO musicians (me in particular, as I am the common link between each of their visits to ArtPlay).

In their first visit, we created three-part stories and devised three musical narratives (movements) to depict these stories. In their second visit, we expanded one of the movements into a whole-ensemble piece.

In this third visit, we needed to create whole-ensemble arrangements for the other two movements they’d created back in April. Our first group arrived on Tuesday morning, bounding into the light-filled ArtPlay space. Several came up and hugged me to say hello (in fact, I got hugs from people in each group across the two days – nice!).

With each of the groups we started with a brief warm-up and then watched video footage from the first workshops, focusing on the musical material we needed to arrange that day. I reminded them of the stories they’d created. Then we arranged our chairs in a circle and got started.

These were very directed workshops – the musical material had already been composed, and so our focus was on arranging and perhaps embellishing. This direction notwithstanding, we still came up with some unexpected new material.

For example, these song lyrics (from the group whose story was about going into the city and getting caught in a terrible storm):

Happy to be together

After the storm

Everyone’s safe, let’s celebrate

Good grief it’s excellent! (Ow!)

The ‘Ow’ is Michael Jackson-style. ‘Good Grief’ was an unexpected offer – I don’t think I’ve ever written a song with that expression in it before!

I loved seeing how much the group from the bushfire-affected school has blossomed over the year. They were careful and thoughtful in their first couple of visits, but this time there was a delightful sense of confidence and playfulness in their approach to the workshop. Also a sense of the possibility of mastery – one boy, for example, asked if he could play the thumb piano (kalimba) again, and added, “Last time, one of the others had a different one that had a card that told you what all the notes were.”

“That’s right – I think we’ve got that one here,” I said, and found it for him. He sat down with the xylophone group and was from then on completely absorbed by his new instrument, working out all the melodies note by note, and finding substitutes for the pitches that were missing on his instrument.

One of the groups comes from the outer western suburbs, and each time they come along, I am struck by two things – how tall they all are(!) and how naturally they groove together. There is a lot of innate musicality in this group – the music tends to sit together really well, without a great deal of ‘containing’ from me. We created two new sections of music with them. I particularly enjoyed our musical depiction of the words Flat. Gravel. Slower travel, with lots of dry, scratching, scraping sounds from a range of percussion instruments.

Our fourth group comes from the outer southern suburbs, and created the story about the Beatbusters. For this visit, they brought along three guitars, and we created a delightful little piece to open the narrative with, that placed one simple riff on the xylophones and accompanied it with a progression of four chords on the guitars. It was one of the charmed pieces of music – so simple, and yet so poignant and effective. Could’ve played it all day. Ah!

Random Round

I’ve been exploring Percy Grainger’s Random Round this week. The Random Round is a piece of very tonal, attractive but quite experimental music, way ahead of its time. Grainger was a truly original thinker, radical and visionary who explores ways of bringing performer-choice and invention into a composed chamber music piece. He wrote it in 1912-1913, for an unspecified range and number of “tone-tools” [instruments].

The score consists of a range of melodies, accompaniment figures and short ostinati, organised into six specific sections. There are some fixed rules about how players must go from one section to the next, and some recommendations that can be followed at the discretion of the “band-boss” [conductor]. The material isn’t interchangeable between sections.

When the Random Round gets put together it can have a very ‘composed’ feel – the sections of music and their specific material and the free order with which you can play them, give a finished version of the piece a strong sense of thematic exposition, development and recapitulation. It can be difficult to achieve this kind of structure using workshop processes; the riff-based group-devised workshop processes that I (and other exponents of the ‘Guildhall School system’) often use can sometimes be harmonically or thematically ‘static’ (unless you have a lot of time to develop and memorise other material that can link to earlier thematic material). The challenge of creating music that has a sense of development and return in a group context using workshop processes is one I have been exploring on and off for the last few years. Grainger’s Random Round offers a possible structural model, I think.

The sad news is I was supposed to be building a project around the Random Round this week, but we couldn’t get hold of an appropriate score or set of parts for the musicians to work from. I wonder if there isn’t one available in Australia? I have been working from a manuscript of the work, written in Grainger’s cursive hand, complete with crossings-out and excited afterthoughts. His ideas literally jump off the page and you get a wonderful sense of his creative energy… but it is hard to read and work from in an ensemble. I am thinking that before I return it to the library I will write out some simple parts of the various ostinati and melodies, so that I can use it with groups in the future.

 

Observing musical leadership

As the person who is usually the project leader, I’ve loved just being a member of the full ensemble for last week’s Beethoven project, leading a small group, playing my instrument (bass clarinet that week) and watching another person lead the overall process. It has been an opportunity to observe someone with a very similar process to my own (which means I have some insights into where he is taking the group with the different tasks he sets) shape and guide the musical content as it evolves.

Firstly, it’s been interesting to be on the receiving end.  I’ve needed to receive and interpret instructions, to respond to tasks without knowing how the material would be used in the overall composition – all the things that participants in my projects experience and respond to. I’ve noticed different things about the group energy and about the leader’s energy that I can use in my own projects, through participating in someone else’s project.

I’ve loved observing the way that Fraser asks questions and sets tasks for the group. I think that the skill of asking questions (or setting tasks) in a creative project is one of the most important skills, and it is a subtle art in itself. The way that tasks are given – the words that are used, the clarity of the starting point, the restrictions or essential criteria that inform how all the different groups’ creations will fit together in the larger piece – makes a huge difference to what each of the groups come up with in response. Some of Fraser’s questions or tasks are similar to ones I like to use, but others are different, and it’s been valuable to be able to hear these, and observe the ways groups have responded.

On warm-ups

We started each day with a warm-up. I know that for me, a good warm-up has always been a cornerstone of a project, a powerful way to assert the spirit of a project and build a cohesive sense of the group. However, sometimes of late, I’ve begun to question the efficacy of warm-up activities with some groups. For example, at Pelican PS I’ve learned that warm-ups really throw the older students off. They find them too confusing, too unrelated. Lessons at Pelican work better if we jump straight into the day’s work with no preamble or easing-in. Similarly, I find that the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble children often arrive on the second day of a project ready to work. They need very little group warm-up at all, and I’ve wondered if the workshop really benefits from the process.

There was one day this week where I arrived feeling incredibly tired and lacklustre. As Fraser got the workshop started I decided to observe myself in the warm-up, and compare how I felt at the end of it to how I felt at the beginning. I wanted to monitor its effectiveness on me.

That morning, Fraser taught us the Chair game. (The children loved this game. They wanted to present it to their parents at the end of the week. One of the MSO players said he wanted to play it all day. Fraser expressed amazement at the oddly frenzied way our group played it – unlike any other group he’d ever played it with, he said). By the end of the game, I realised that I did indeed feel more relaxed, awake, alive, and definitely ready to work. So, I shall persevere with my warm-up investigation for my projects.

It was also interesting to see Fraser teach another warm-up game that I often teach here. It is one I learned in England during my studies there, and I always loved it, always found it incredibly fun, energy-building, focus-generating, playful… However, it has never really worked here. It involves people using their voices and physical gestures. I’ve never been able to get a group in Australia to generate the kind of energy that the game needs to work its magic. It wasn’t all that different for Fraser either, and we talked about this later – the game was fun, but it never quite worked. Perhaps it is just a game that doesn’t suit the Australian psyche or energy, or the way we use our voices… or our relationship with our voices. Interesting.

Time and Space

I’ve spent the last 5 days working on a single project. That’s right – five full days on a composition project (the sort of project I normally do in two days) with a group of 24 young musicians, five music students from the conservatorium, 4 professional musicians, the project leader and myself. And the project isn’t even finished yet – there is another full day, then a final rehearsal call, and then the actual performance.

It’s been wonderful to enjoy the space that so much time brings to the creative process. There is time to get to know each other and build rapport in an easy, unpressured way; time to laugh, have fun, and be playful without each of those tasks needing to link to a specific creative outcome; time to explore ideas – including some we might not end up using, but that capture our imaginations at the time; time to refine our ideas and learn to play them well; time to hone, to memorise and to develop performance finesse. We were in the hands of Fraser Trainer, a highly skilled and inspiring musical leader from the UK.

Most of the projects I lead for orchestras run for only two days. While we certainly fit a lot into those two days, and create very detailed, original music, I’ve often felt that the pace that we set means that the young participants barely have time to process all the new things they are doing, before the project has ended. They have an intense, immersed experience, but only one night’s sleep before it is all over. How – and when – do they begin to digest the experience, reflect on what they have learned, and how the experience has added to their perception of their musical selves?

It is a common curse in both arts and education (maybe elsewhere too) that there is a far greater capacity to ‘pull out all the stops’ for a visitor, in terms of resources and time. For example, I know that when I go into a school as a visiting artist, I am given more space in the timetable – a full day, for example, with the students missing other classes in order to do the music project – as well as the support of a teacher in the room with me. These are luxuries that the regular music teacher does not enjoy in their week-to-week practice.  But these efforts can hopefully bring changes to the local environment after the visitor has gone.

This 5-day project offered a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when more time is allowed. “How’s it going?” a senior manager of the orchestra asked me at lunchtime on Tuesday (day 2). “I mean, usually, by this time on the second day, you are getting ready to perform, aren’t you?” So, that significant difference is noted. I think it was an eye-opener for everyone. Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to conceive of projects that have more expansive timeframes, or a range of timeframes. Hopefully too, this project will mean that there will already be an understanding of how much difference the length of a project can make to the young people’s experience, and to the overall depth of the work.

Screams around the space

On Saturday I led the MSO ArtPlay ensemble (27 children aged 8-13 and 7 MSO musicians) in a remount of their composition response to Brett Dean’s Beggars and Angels. Remounts can be enormous undertakings, especially when the music you are remounting was created (and memorised as we went along, not written down) over an intensive 2-day period, over 2 months ago! Lots of transcribing from the audio and video recording on my part… However, remounts are also an opportunity to develop the music further and to present it to a wider audience, and in this case, we also got to perform it in a much larger venue (Melbourne Town Hall) as part of MSO’s Education Week.

We did good. No, we did great! It was a long day, but well worth the effort, because our composition developed significantly from its original performance, and all the Ensemble members developed as a result.

In one section, the music required members of the ensemble to give sudden screams, shouts, and maniacal bursts of laughter. The performance in the Town Hall (a very broad and resonant space) I had the opportunity to play with spatial effects. I positioned 7 players behind the audience for this ‘screams section’ (mysterioso, the children called it), spread across the back of the hall.

When we got to this part of the performance I could see the Ensemble members really getting into it. A huge amount of energy was being generated by these screams – it was palpable, and I stretched the section out to spread that energy throughout the hall.

After the performance, as we walked back to the Green room along the backstage corridor, the children were buzzing with excitement.

“Gillian, there was the lady, and when we screamed she jumped!” one player told me excitedly. “And there was this baby, and when I screamed the first time, it just stared and stared at me, the whole time, until the music stopped! I just had to stare straight ahead…”

Parents and friends later told us that they hadn’t even seen the players leave their places on the stage, so engrossed had they been in the music (and so discretely had the musicians moved to their positions – nice work, 10-12 year-olds!) I think the scream section was most people’s favourite part of the piece. People from the orchestra who had heard the original performance back in April thought the screams were something we’d added for the remount – but no, they were there all along. It was the use of space that enhanced them and brought them to the fore.

Even though remounts create lots of challenges in re-memorising a piece, it also gives the children a chance to revisit and improve upon their composition work and to understand it better, with the benefit of a little distance. Our performance on Saturday was richer and far more polished than the one we gave in April at the end of our two-day project. We’d had an extra day with the same material. It makes an enormous difference to the children’s processing of the musical ideas. Two days will feel very short when we start our Bartok project in July.

New music, new audience

Last night I went to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s last concert in the Metropolis Festival of contemporary music at the Malthouse Theatre. Members of the current MSO ArtPlay Ensemble, who worked with me last month on a composition project inspired by Brett Dean’s Beggars and Angels, were also there in the audience. Good on them! They came along to Brett’s pre-concert interview (“Our youngest-ever pre-concert talk audience!” the Director of Artistic Planning told me delightedly) and then stayed for the concert – 2 hours of it. All contemporary music, where Webern was the most old-school of the composers presented.

“What did you think of the music?” I asked one of the youngsters, who was admittedly looking a little dazed at interval.

“Pretty good,” he told me earnestly, adding shyly, “It was a bit loud sometimes.” It certainly was, I agreed. This was the young violinist who had repeatedly, sweetly, raised in his hand during the workshops in April to ask, “Umm, Gillian, can we take a break now?” I felt impressed at his fortitude at what must have been a late-night concert for him.

However, I’m not imagining any great fortitude was required for the concert repertoire. I love seeing this age group (8-12) at contemporary music concerts. There is so much for them to experience – the huge range of unconventional sounds, the awesome virtuosity of some of the performers (last night we were treated to not one but two performances by pianist Michael Kieran Harvey, who is incapable of not making every single one of the notes he plays utterly compelling), the intensity and activity of the percussion section, the detail of the stage moves between pieces… it’s such a complete, alive, dynamic experience for them.

As I sat there, I found myself listening with two sets of ears and imaginations. One was for myself, but the other was imagining what the children were experiencing and noticing.  I’m looking forward to seeing them again in June when we remount our Beggars and Angels piece. I’m hoping they will bring lots of ideas from this concert experience with them.

Inclusive and participatory

How often are the hurdles to playing music in a group – like having a full chromatic scale under your fingers, or being able to read music – removed so that ensemble music experiences are truly inclusive and participatory?

“The aim of the jams,” I told my new orchestral musician recruits, “is to get everyone playing, with as little delay as possible.”

Yesterday’s Jams on Prokofiev, held at Federation Square, were a wonderful success. We had over 150 people take part across the two sessions, including lots of parents, and several adults taking part without children in tow, and the music was received with great delight.

I had two first-timers among the team of MSO musicians taking part, so I talked them through the process and in doing so, reminded myself of some of the things we have learned about these workshops that make them such a positive, affirming experience of ensemble playing for all the participants.

• Be in the space fifteen minutes before start time, when the first people arrive. Say hello, gather a section of like instruments around you. Find out their names, encourage them to get out their instrument and start playing.
• Give out a page of music at the registration table. This can be very simple (see my Noteflight score for an example of the pared-back music I give out). This gives the participants something to get busy doing as soon as they arrive – they can start checking out the part, and you (the group leader) will get a sense of their strengths and confidence as a player. Find out what they know, and what they might be able to learn from you in the session.
• Watch the key signatures. Stick to keys that allow beginner string players to play on open strings only, and that transpose into simple keys for the transposing instruments. D major may be wonderful for strings, but it is awkward for beginner clarinets!
• Some kids come along feeling very unsure that they will know enough to ‘jam with the MSO’. It’s often better to assess their playing by playing with them, rather than by asking them what grades they have done in their music exams!
• I like to start with a groove – something rhythmically strong that encourages full commitment from everyone and hooks the youngest participants into a catchy rhythm.
• Each time the group leader sets up an ‘inventing task’, turn to your group and ask for their input. Some groups will have participants who make lots of offers. Others will work more slowly. You can encourage input by asking very specific questions (“Which of these notes do you think we should start on?”) but also make your own offers, in order to keep the group energy flowing and engaged.
• Get everyone playing as much as possible. Move through different sections of music so as to engage with the imagination and different skill bases, but aim to have as little ‘talk time’ as possible.
• Finish with a final performance. It gives the participants a sense of how far they have come in just an hour.