Music Construction Site

During the first week of the school holidays, I led the first workshops of my 2012 project series at ArtPlay. We set up the Music Construction Site – a busy place of work and activity where the tools of the trade were percussion instruments of all shapes and sizes (as well as any instruments the construction workers chose to bring along with them), and the construction took the form of a large graphic score, made up of images and symbols denoting the children’s sounds and musical inventions.

There were two workshops – one for 5-8 year olds and their parents, and the other for 9-12 year olds. Here are some images from the day:

We started the 5-8 year olds with a bit of free exploration of the different instruments, letting them get a feel for the tools:

Once everyone had invented a sound or musical fragment, they needed to create its blueprint (graphic score):

We used symbols and images to make decisions about the best way to order and structure all our sounds. Here, I’m talking about the role of “the element of surprise” in a piece of music:

ArtPlay is situated in Birrarung Marr. If the weather is fine we can send some groups to work outside.

At the end of the workshop, we put all the sounds in order and play through the score.

The next workshops at ArtPlay will be on Sunday 17th June. This time, we’ll be boarding the New Music Express – transforming stories into music!

Planning, scoping, sequencing

Last week I presented a Teaching Artist professional learning seminar on planning, scoping and sequencing a new music project. Teaching artists frequently work in partnership with a classroom or specialist teacher, so planning tends to be collaborative. However, teachers and artists often approach project planning in different ways. I drew upon my own experiences and talked about:

The importance of learning as much as you can about the class

This includes what are they working on in class, but also some of the additional goals of the classroom. At the Melbourne English Language School (where I’ve worked as a teaching artist since 2005), these goals often include things like social skills, rules of personal hygiene or some of the cultural practices of school in Australia (like being able to line up before entering the classroom). These non-arts, non-music goals and themes can often provide fertile ground for a music or creative arts project.

The many ways to your intended goal

The more input students have in a creative project, the more ownership they will feel towards it and the more engaged they will be by the process. I encouraged my colleagues to listen out for offers and suggestions that could take the project off into a new or unexpected direction. Sometimes these offers are made in jest, or with great sarcasm – this is often a protection on the part of the child and it’s important to look beyond it to the idea being expressed. Sometimes, suggestions will be unconscious, occurring when the child is daydreaming, or retreating into their own head for a moment, but with an instrument in their hands. Tapping fingers can provide insights into a child’s previous musical experiences, knowledge and culture. It’s important to leave space in the classroom environment for these offers to slip into, as well as space in the evolving creative work.

Communicating with your teaching partner

There are often points in a creative project where work is emerging but you, the artist, are not clear exactly where it is going to go, or how it will all fit together. This happens to me in many projects and I’ve learned that it is part of my process, so it doesn’t worry me. However, teachers have very different planning and reporting obligations to teaching artists, and work that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere specific can create concern for teachers who want to know there is a sequence and plan underpinning everything.

I think that each one of us – teachers and teaching artists alike – has a different tolerance of ‘risk’ or unknowns in a creative project. It’s therefore important to keep lines of communication open. Teaching artists may need to talk through those parts of their process that are more open-ended, or where you have simply opened up an experience to the students in order to see what material emerges in their response, but you are confident that it will yield something important for the project outcome.

What does this look like in practice?

In tandem with my consideration of these different points in the planning and sequencing process, I described a 10-week project that I’d led in 2008 (I chose it because I’d documented it particularly thoroughly). I shared my notebook from that project with my teaching artist colleagues (complete with all my random musings, sketches, shorthand music notations, and margin doodles) pointing out those days where material had been developed and locked in, those days where things went off in a different direction, and when I’d developed material without knowing how it would ultimately be used in the performance. We ended by watching a video of the project’s final performance, so that we could see what had resulted from the lessons that were detailed in the notebook.

When I was first asked to lead this session, I was a bit hesitant. I often think my approach is quite freeform, and trying to anticipate exactly what will happen throughout the term feels very counter-intuitive. But once I started to dig into it, I could see there were key steps that I take in developing each project, and a number of golden, guiding values that inform all the choices I make. When you start to write these down, a plan and a sequence definitely emerges!

Artists inviting possibility

I am often approached by young musicians who want to develop workshop skills and get some more experience working with groups of children. This year, I’ve got a formal mentoring relationship set up. Ryan, a young recorder soloist and highly creative individual (based on our conversations thus far!), approached me at the end of last year to see if I could work with him to develop a workshop program for children that he could deliver as part of a broader touring and performance program.

Good on him! So far, we’ve mapped out a plan of action that includes developing a 2-hour workshop for primary school children that gets them to create their own music and embed it within a larger, contemporary solo work for recorder. Ryan is also going to spend some time in other workshops with me throughout the year, shadowing me and developing a repertoire of approaches and strategies for developing compositions with children.

At our first meeting, we focused on WHAT  – what is Ryan’s main aim? Is it a workshop that lasts a day? A few hours? Is it a longer residency? Is it a tailored approach, or an ‘off-the-shelf’ framework that he can adapt as he goes? Is it something that can link to his performance skills and concert-giving?

Ryan emphasised the importance of ‘being able to leave something behind’. He was well-aware of the weaknesses of the ‘parachute’ model (where the glamorous, charismatic visiting artist parachutes in, does their arts project, then leaves just as swiftly, with little of substance left in their wake). At the same time, I countered, a visiting artist has to be realistic about what is possible. You are a visitor. You are only there for a short time – a matter of hours, usually. Anything sustainable is going to require the buy-in and efforts of the class teacher. You have no control over what they do or don’t do in the classroom with relation to your visit, no matter how valuable such input might be.

Perhaps therefore, the artist’s visit is about inviting possibility for individual participants, with tangible skills and tools being part of the outcomes for the participants, but also the intangibles of inspiration, example and possibility. The next steps that individuals may take after a workshop experience – such as re-producing and re-experiencing their workshop outcome with you without your guidance, or furthering their skills and concepts through independent research, or simply the motivation to seek out further opportunities – are essential to a sustained ‘legacy’ from a workshop, given that music itself doesn’t result in any kind of physical artefact. How to plant the strongest, most potent and robust seeds, then, is the next big challenge for the artist! We’ll start looking at content in our next meeting together; meanwhile, Ryan is going to get busy reading Keith Johnstone, Graeme Leak and others on inspiring creative outcomes in groups.

Wet and dry sounds

With the preps and grade 1s in my current ‘Composer in the Classroom’ project (for Musica Viva at St John’s Primary School, Clifton Hill), we created a composition of ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ sounds. I suggested that for me, a ‘wet’ sound was one that rang on for a long time after being struck (similar to the way a pebble dropped in a pond creates ripples that last a long time). A dry sound was shorter and more… well, dry.

The children selected percussion instruments, listened to each one by one and decided whether the sound was wet or dry.

“Wet!” chorused in response to the magical tones of a wind chime.

“Dry!” they all agreed after hearing the rasp of a guiro.

I explained that the label was a subjective one – they could have their own opinion about what was ‘wet’ or ‘dry’. Some instruments provoked interesting debate – the resonant tones of the djembe for example. They could hear that it had resonance, but not for as long as some of the metal instruments. And as a metal instrument, the cabasa was proof that ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ categories didn’t necessarily align with what the instrument was made of.

Next we played the instruments one by one around the circle, but this time, they needed to wait until the ring of the previous instrument had completely ended. This demanded careful listening and concentration – always a risky endeavour with this age group, but they were thoroughly engaged and intrigued by the range of sounds in their midst and were pedantic about waiting until the previous sound had entirely finished (and if they weren’t, one of their classmates would be sure to point it out).

We then moved onto graphic scores. I asked each child to draw a symbol to represent their sound. Some found this a challenging task, but others were impressively painstaking in their approach and their teacher and I marveled at all that they could hear in their instrument’s sound. One girl’s symbol for her glockenspiel note appeared like a huge blue jagged scribble; however, her teacher told me it was actually a very layered image. She’d started with a simple wave form, then added additional layers to it, representing all the complexity of her sound. A girl playing a pair of claves carefully placed a small green dot in the centre of her page (see the second image, bottom right).

We stuck the symbols on the wall in a line. The children sat on the floor facing the wall, their instruments in hand, and on my cue, performed their piece. They read their way across their score, each person playing when their symbol appeared, and engaged and focused from beginning to end.

Constructive criticism, healthy dialogue

How does a musician learn to be a strong music workshop leader? One of the things I remember (and sometimes miss) most about my times at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where I did my training, is the considerable amount of time my fellow students and I spend discussing and critiquing our own and each other’s workshop efforts. These conversations could go into amazing detail – not just about workshop content but about the words we’d used to describe tasks, or the way we’d phrased a question, and alternative wordings or gestures that might have generated different results. It was rich, painstaking constructive criticism and we all learned a lot from it.

When I took on the teaching of Community Music at NMIT this semester, I thought a lot about how I could engender a constructive culture of criticism and feedback in the class, getting all the students to engage deeply with the skills I’d be teaching them. One of their assessment tasks is to lead a short workshop in class, for their peers. I wanted these to be workshops that everyone contributed to – first by taking part, and then by sharing and analysing their experiences with the leader.

I decided to this using a peer-assessment model. Inspired by this blog post on The Teaching Tom-Tom, I worked with the students to develop a suitable rubric for use in class with the workshops, so that they would all be assessing each other’s work.

First we brainstormed a list of all the things a good workshop includes. The list of characteristics was later condensed down into six criteria on their assessment rubric.

Next we discussed context-relevant gradations. The students nominated a range of 5 grading categories –

• Uninspired and uninspiring (harsh words, I felt, but the students were unanimous that this was a reasonable thing to label a workshop, and would be a good incentive to people to ensure that no-one would have a reason to tick this box)
• Embryonic
• Developing
• Dress rehearsal
• Gig-worthy

Then they divided into groups to devise the text that would go under each grade heading, for each of the 6 criteria. I wrote all the ‘Gig-worthy’ text so that they had something to work backwards from. I then took their contributions away, tweaked things slightly to ensure consistency across the gradations, and typed up a draft version of the rubric for their comments, and later approval.

“Make sure you are happy to have these grades and criteria applied to your own work,” I reminded them, “and that you are happy to use them to assess someone else’s.”

Has it worked? At this stage, halfway through our season of student-led workshops, I’d say it has been a successful strategy. The rubric gives focus to the discussions after each workshop. In general, I feel that the scores they give each other are a suitable reflection of the work that was done (although I do think they deem things ‘gig-worthy’ more readily than I do!). Most importantly, there seems to be a strong sense of ownership of the process and descriptions, and a willingness to consider the ways that strong work differs from weak or less convincing work, taking this into account when they plan and lead their own workshops.

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.

Music and Health

A couple of years ago I presented to a group of teaching artists from the Festival for Healthy Living program, discussing the inherent ‘healthy’ qualities of music-making, with particular regard for mental health. It was an interesting idea to work on, and a lovely group of very committed, engaged artists to present to and spend the day with. That presentation has now been turned into an article for the Creating for Wellbeing website, and I stumbled upon it recently. You can read the article here.

While visiting the site, you might also be interested to read some of the other artists’ reflections on art-making and wellbeing.There is a wealth of information and ideas within the site. Browse through the ‘Themes’ tab to get an idea of the range of topics.

I’m very focused on writing at the moment – articles and more articles about my East Timor residency, including descriptive writing for newsletters and magazines and more serious, scholarly papers for journals and conferences. On some days the words flow, and on others, they really struggle to get out!

“I don’t want to do this anymore!”

Thursday, day 56, in Baucau

That was my thought at lunchtime yesterday, sitting with Tony in Café Victoria on the main street of Old Town Baucau. Why?

I’m in Baucau, and today was the first day of The Right to Play, the project I am leading in partnership with a local arts organisation here. Tony and I arrived 2 days ago, on Tuesday.

Yesterday felt like an example of all that is challenging about cross-cultural work. To start with, things that I had thought were organised and confirmed, were not. The person I had set the project up with was not in town. I’d known he was going away, but had expected his return the previous week. Then, when I stopped by on the way to Lospalos last week, I’d learned he was not due back until December 7^th – the same day Tony and I would arrive in Baucau. So we went by his office on the afternoon of the 7^th, to be told that he wasn’t expected until the following day, “or maybe the day after”.

Of course my mind started going into a bit of a panic. This was a big and ambitious project we had planned together. We now had UN support and interest in it. I went into Plan B mode, and arranged to meet with the coordinator’s assistant the following morning at 10am to see what we could put in place in time for the project start on Thursday. I began to wonder if the training and planning session we’d scheduled for Wednesday (the next day) would happen.

When we arrived to meet the assistant at 10am on Wednesday, the coordinator was there! Which was a great relief. We all sat down and started to talk through the project at hand. There seemed no time to lose, and lots to do. We each had a list of tasks, and I thought we had arranged to go our separate ways to complete the errands, and meet back in an hour.

When Tony and I got back, no-one was there. We waited, and the others arrived but the coordinator wasn’t there. In the meantime, I showed the other staff the videos I had of instrument-making and other activities that were relevant to the project we had planned. I then tried to stimulate discussion about how we might source some of the instrument-making materials.

Notice my language here? I… I… I…. Was I imposing this project on these patient, long-suffering people who were too polite to say anything? I had thought we were working in partnership but perhaps this was all way more than they wanted to take on. Where I had thought the roles and capacities of each of us was clear, perhaps they had expected I would have it all in hand, and didn’t understand what I was doing, showing them these videos and asking for their thoughts on drum-making.

Before I came here, I had been thinking and reading a lot about cross-cultural arts projects, and about the dangers and power-based assumptions that can come into play when well-meaning people from the West come into developing countries very clear about what it is they want to contribute, and all the benefits it will bring to the local people, but without ever really asking the local people if this is what they want. I didn’t want to fall into this trap, and was determined to be mindful of asking people their thoughts, and of not imposing my own musical constructs and assumptions on other people, especially when I know so little about their own musical cultures.

This then demands a tricky balance from me in terms of why I have been funded to come here. Asialink funding is artist-focused. It is primarily for the professional development of the Australian artist. That is an unusual thing in a developing country, I think. Most funding – particularly for cultural projects – would be about building capacity among local artists, and creating opportunities for them to develop their own work, and build skills in the production and realisation of that work. For my project, I have been looking for ways where this will come naturally as an outcome of any work I engage in. I’ve been looking for mutually-beneficial projects and relationships, in other words. But in doing so, and in a timeline of just 12 weeks, perhaps it is inevitable that the balance is wrong. Or difficult to manage. It is certainly a challenge to manage!

So there we were at the arts centre, engaged in what felt like a futile time-killing endeavour with the assisting staff, managing with my thoroughly inadequate language skills, given the lack of background these staff seemed to have about the project. Tony and I decided to leave and go and get some lunch. At lunch, I started to cry, tears of frustration and confusion, and a kind of shame that I seemed to have become exactly what I had wanted to avoid becoming here – the bossy white person snapping their fingers and getting frustrated when it doesn’t go their way. If we hadn’t told so many people about the project, and got their support, I probably would have shelved the whole thing.

It doesn’t help to have these thoughts and feelings on an empty stomach, and once I’d eaten some lunch I began to feel more energised. For the first time, chatting with Tony, I began to have some ideas about the musical content of the project. (I find it incredibly difficult to make the shift into artistic content planning when I know so much of the project coordination is still unsettled and not locked-in or confirmed). It felt good to finally be able to play around with some musical ideas. This is the difference that having a familiar collaborator around to bounce ideas off can make.

Later that afternoon, I went to the venue to confirm our booking, and pay for it. This was important. I wanted to hand some money over in order to guarantee we had somewhere to work. I met with the priest in charge of the parish where the Campo de Alegria is situated, and gave him the money. He pocketed it and thanked me for the contribution, explaining that later in January they hoped to hold some sports competitions for the local young people, and this rental money would go towards realising that project.

Then Tony and I walked back up to the Arts Centre. The coordinator still hadn’t returned, and I had to assume the training and planning session that we had planned for him and his staff was not going to happen that day. I spoke with the two staff who were there, and explained I was feeling very insecure about the project at this stage, given that I hadn’t been able to meet properly with them all, that we were still waiting to see the lists of children’s names in order to phone them one by one to remind them to come (given that they had registered for the project some weeks earlier). I admitted that I was worried that the arts centre might not really want to do the project, and that I felt bad that I might be pushing things too hard. (This was a tricky conversation in Tetun by the way. My scant little dictionary has so few words for feelings and emotions – you have to get by with things like, good, not good, not very good, bad, feeling good, not feeling good, etc). They responded to me kindly, and reassured me that definitely the children from School No. 1 were coming, as they all lived in the area of the Arts Centre, and that definitely there was nothing to worry about.

As we walked back home, I realised I felt better, despite feeling not so great! I knew the venue was booked. I knew Tony and I would be there. I knew that if the arts centre staff were keen they would be there, and if they weren’t, I could book an interpreter and complete the project that way. I knew I was trying my best to figure out the best way to behave and communicate. Something musical would happen the next day.

On being a facilitator

Thursday last week was the culmination of the Thinking about Forever project, which I worked on back in March with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Parramatta String Players and composer Matthew Hindson. My role was as the workshop facilitator, and I directed the process that led to the young musicians composing their own music material with dancers in mind, and in response to the given theme of ‘sustainability’. Six months on and the music we created over that intensive weekend has been worked into an inspired and deft score by Matthew, the music then recorded by the ACO and choreographed by Kay Armstrong and the YouMove dance company. Last Thursday it was presented at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta, to an audience of school students from throughout Western Sydney and a number of invited guests from the Australia Council Executive, and other arts organisations.

The facilitator role is an interesting one. What does it mean to facilitate, and to facilitate well? I think of it as being responsible for establishing the right creative environment for the project initially, and then initiating or provoking a series of responses to a task by the participants. As the group work gets underway, the facilitator role is to guide, scaffold, model and encourage, as necessary. Ultimately, the facilitator’s role includes stepping away and allowing the group to work and present themselves independently. I think about the origins of the word ‘facilitate’ coming from ‘to make easy’. A good facilitator moves participants through a process in a way that makes it easier for them.

It can be quite an invisible role. In some ways, the mark of a good facilitator might be in their capacity to step back at critical point where the group is able to work completely independently, and to have guided them in such a way that when they look back on it, they remember the process as one where they did everything themselves, by themselves. I’m exaggerating slightly – but only slightly!

One of the nice things about this project was that my role in drawing the young musicians’ compositional ideas from them, and guiding them to build these into a larger structure, was very much acknowledged, alongside that of Matthew’s work as the composer who drew those ideas into a fully-realised, through-composed score, and Kay Armstrong the choreographer. It’s an acknowledgment that everyone in a creative team brings something to the project, that if one of the group hadn’t been there, the outcome would have been very different. Thinking about Forever has been a very satisfying project to work on – a great collaboration between a large number of creative minds, from the very young, to the seasoned professionals.