They are polyspot markers – about 10cm in diameter, and they have been my most useful tool in these last few weeks of getting groups of children ready for performances.

I’m sure I’m not the only teacher working with children who grits teeth and steels themself whenever they have to organise a group into rows or some other kind of formation. The children I teach have a very poor sense of themselves in a space, in relation to others. They don’t process directional instructions terribly well (as in, “stand here/move slightly left/etc”) mainly because they don’t listen when people are talking, and because the excitement and buzzy energy in the room distracts them from remembering to listen to what they are asked to do.

The markers have saved my sanity! Now I just set them out on the floor before the class enters the room or performance space, then say to individuals:

“Go and stand on a white spot.”

“Go and stand on a red spot.”

Several years ago, I began observing the importance of floor markings and other visual cues for ESL children. The children relax and tune in far more quickly when they are able to follow a very clear unambiguous instruction.

My only complaint about the polyspot markers I have is that they are smaller than I’d like – I want something about the size of a dinner plate. Also, they are not quite robust enough, given the way children love to pick things up and twist them, pull them and generally test them, if they have the opportunity. One has already ripped. I got these from the Music In Motion online store; I’m on the look-out for a bigger set. A friend has a set of spots that she says is a portable Twister game! Now that sounds like the sort of thing I’m after!

Firstly, this was the period in which the year-long City Beats percussion composition projects drew to a close. A team of myself plus two musicians travelled to each of the schools, and the children performed the music they’d composed with us to an audience made up of their fellow students, their teachers, and on some occasions, their parents.

The performance outcomes for City Beats were an addition to the original program, and it changed the project focus. It meant that the children’s fourth and final visit to ArtPlay was spent revisiting all the music they’d composed – relearning and re-memorising it, essentially. For one group, made up of children from grades 3-6, their workshop was on a hot Thursday afternoon. They arrived at ArtPlay already quite hot and tired (some had already been swimming in the morning), and while they were all geared up to play some music, the last thing some of them felt like doing was applying themselves to the task of relearning and memorising music that was over and done with, in their minds.

“Is this the right thing to be doing?” I wondered to myself as I determinedly kept us on task, working our way through the music, and repeating sections until they were understood. “What they really want to be doing today is just hanging out and jamming.”

This group is already very free creatively – perhaps for them, jamming and making things up as they go along is already a strength and a preferred way of learning and working. Perhaps the discipline of working on one piece until it is “performance ready” is one that they resist. Repeating things feels counter-intuitive… the capacity to ‘delay gratification’ is one that doesn’t come easily.

Were there other reasons for the City Beats performances, other than celebrating the children’s achievements over the year and sharing them with their own school community? For the children from the bushfire-affected community, there were additional important benefits that the teachers shared with us over a post-performance cup of tea.

“For our children, the fires are their most recent big memory. They don’t remember much of their lives from before the day of the fires – it’s painful to do so. One of the things we are very focused on doing for the children at our school is helping them create new, good memories. This project, and this performance in particular, is one of these. They will remember the music, they’ll remember working with you and all the musicians, and they’ll remember this day when you came to their school and performed their music with them.”

Another project that took place recently was AccessFest, a festival of music performed by people with disabilities and professional musicians, held in Armidale New South Wales. AccessFest was a series of creative music workshops that culminated in a performance. Again, I felt concerned at times that the performance outcome could put undue pressure on the participants, and worked hard to ensure a playful and spontaneous approach in the workshops, allowing for unexpected things to take place within the workshop flow. This carried over into the performance as well.

The AccessFest performance was a chance for the participants to be in the limelight, to be applauded and have their work appreciated. But it was also a chance for their carers and families – whose lives are often very stressful, dealing with the challenges that disabilities can bring – to observe their loved one in a new environment, where different strengths would shine through, or aspects of their personalities or quirks or obsessions become integral parts of the performance. All the performers dressed up in their smartest, most colourful clothes for the performance. There was jewellery, make-up, and flash outfits – this was an event! There would have been many special memories for people to savour at the end of this performance.

Every project needs an outcome of some kind, a way to put a line under the work and declare that point in the process complete. It needn’t be a performance outcome (recorded outcomes in projects or informal ‘sharings’ are also effective). It’s a way of bringing all the creative energy together, channelling and focusing it into one ‘event’ that allows you to draw the project to a close.

I’ve really enjoyed my year at Pelican. I feel, after two years working there, I’ve now found an approach with these children that works well. Inspired by my reading of Lucy Green’s research, and the Musical Futures ideas that I learned about in the April workshop, I’ve been using a lot of popular music as the vehicles for developing musical understanding among the students. It’s resulted in huge student engagement, a real love for music classes and participation, and lots of creative ideas, being generated by the students themselves.

Some highlights:

Parents Rock! Band

This year I put together a small band of parents to accompany all the concert items. I had a guitarist, a violinist/pianist and a percussionist. I roped in Tony to play bass guitar. We got together a week before the concert to rehearse each of the songs. The Parents Rock! Band (as I called them) was a hit. I want this idea to grow. Hopefully we can draw more parents into it, particularly from the African communities that are so strong in our community.

Grade 2 pianist

Year 2/3 performed a version of K’naan’s Wavin’ Flag. One of the students learns piano and I’d given him a simple chart with the melody and harmonic accompaniment for the 2 sections of the song. This little boy is normally very quiet and reluctant to participate in his class’ music lessons (I suspect it all gets too noisy for him). I’ve never seen him smile so broadly, and look as proud as he did in the whole-school dress rehearsal the day of the concert, when he performed with his class and with the Parents Rock! Band.

Singing their hearts out again

The year 4/5, who earlier had had a hit with their rendition of California Dreamin’, sang Rolling in the Deep. Again, we sang in two parts, and had a number of soloists. In the staff room on the day of the concert, teachers raved about the different solo singers, expressing their delight in hearing how good the voices were – qualities they often hadn’t realised were there.

Taking ownership

The grade 5/6 students developed a dance routine for Party Rock Anthem. This was the concert finale. I found some choreography on Youtube, and we worked with that for 4 weeks, watching the video in class on the interactive whiteboard.

Lots of them watched it outside of school hours too. It became a real project – something that was challenging to learn but possible. “This is not just about learning to dance,” I told them. “It’s a chance to learn how you learn, how you can teach yourself new things by working on them consistently.” They were hugely motivated – the most motivated I’ve seen them all year – and took tremendous ownership of their concert item. They requested an edited version of the song (some of the sections needed to be doubled in length to fit their choreography), listened carefully when I explained the song’s structure, and developed a some good ensemble choreography.

Equally significant was the difference in their interpersonal relationships. This is a class that is often hard on each other – they are quick to laugh and jeer when one of the group makes a mistake in class – it’s quite alarming to witness sometimes. This meanness started to lessen during the dance project. When individuals moved into the centre of the space to perform short solos, the rest of the group whooped, cheered and clapped, supporting them on. We told them to do this initially, but again, they took it on and made it their own. There was so much pride and confidence spilling out of that class by the night of the concert – they were so excited to performed their dance!

The building of esteem in the school choir

The choir gave their best performance of the year at the end-of-year concert. We sang three songs – Vuma vuma ( a 2-part Zulu song that I learned from one of my students at NMIT), which we sang with dance actions; La Isla Bonita, taking our 2-part harmonies directly from the Madonna recording; and Firework, taking inspiration from the version performed by PS22 Chorus.

This has been such a successful year for the choir. I’ve had 34 consistent members throughout the year – that’s nearly 3 times the usual number. I’ve had equal numbers of boys and girls, and strong participation from students in older classes. I started the year by finding them tangible examples (‘models’) for them to look to in developing their voices and building ambition about what they could achieve in the choir. I developed a more formal structure for rehearsals to which they responded particularly well. With all of these initiatives, I wanted to help them put their work in context – to see their work as being authentic, with real-world value. The choice of popular songs helps with this, but we also sang several more traditional or varied songs, such as Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho, one of our main concert songs this year. Choir now has cache in the school, I think.

Creative inspiration

All this performance work adds an additional element to the children’s imaginative lives. Children approach me in the yard to share the latest song they’ve just written, such as this little gem:

There’s a boy and girl, they really like each other

They’re holding hands, oh yeah

They really love each other, oh yeah

And now, they’re gonna get ma-a-a-a-arried

Or the latest dance routine they’ve made up. The lunchtime immediately after the younger years saw the year 5/6 shuffle dance, there were huddles of prep, grade 1 & 2 shufflers scattered all across the playground.

The students teach their siblings the songs they are learning in class. Something I loved about the whole-school dress rehearsal on the day of the concert was the way the children sang along with each others’ songs.

The plan was: I would wander out into the playground about ten minutes before the bell rang. They would all be looking out for me. I’d raise my arm to wave to them (as you do), but really I’d be doing a 5-4-3-2-1 countdown with my fingers. This would be the cue for us to start our dance, a formation magically emerging from the hordes of playing children. The music teacher was on yard duty so would join in the performance with us.

Unfortunately, I can’t share the video of the event with you – it was too tricky to film it without showing any children’s faces (and we don’t have permission to publish such materials). But they loved it, loved the idea of making a flashmob, loved breaking into dance in the middle of the playground at lunchtime, wanted to do it many times over. A few others tried to join in too (an indicator of a good flashmob, we decided).

Thanks to all the teachers at St John’s Primary Clifton Hill for making me so welcome during my residency. Thanks to all the gorgeous children, and thanks especially to Mary-Anne who invited me to work with her students over these last three weeks.

We created two pieces – a laid-back A-minor groove, and a frantic, schizophrenic contemporary piece that jumped between genres, styles and pastiche with a randomness that would be right at home in any downtown New York club.

Take a look:

Here’s some footage and sound from the workshop – read on for a description of what we did to get to this point.

Getting started

Free improv is a big topic to tackle in just 3 hours! We started by discussing roles that you can take in an ensemble – assertive and passive, or foreground and background, for example. This led to our first whole-group improvisations, which were characterised by fairly homogenous playing, traditional sounds and tonalities, and very little space, and opened up dialogue about the importance of shape, structure, endings, and having both a macro and a micro view of the work.

Duos – switching roles

We then divided the group into duos and trios and asked them to develop together a short improvisation, in which all the players switched roles (ie. started in the foreground, but the move to the background, or vice versa).

Fast and loud

The performances that the duos and trios came back with highlighted the carefulness with which most of them played. To encourage a freer approach to sound and technique, Tony led a short, intense loud group improvisation, cueing the group as a whole or individuals to play loud and fast – as loud and fast as possible. The group visibly relaxed and became more animated during this task. They took more risks and exerted themselves far more.

Personal challenges

By now, we knew quite a bit about the roles and musical vocabularies each student tended to veer towards. We wanted to challenge these, and push them to discover some new possibilities for themselves and for the ensemble. We sat in a circle and Tony gave each person an individual ‘challenge’ or ‘project’ to focus on for the rest of the session. These included things like:

• Singing and playing
• Multiphonics
• Incredibly fast, finger movements while exploring the full harmonic series (overblowing) on the instrument
• Percussive articulations on wind instruments
• Extremities of pitch, and playing for longer periods of time on the oboe
• Inventing a scale (as a way of pushing people away from familiar tonalities)

Each person then spent 7 minutes (we were short on time at this point) getting to grips with this personal assignment. They then teamed up with 3-4 other players (of ‘like’ instrument or assignment, where appropriate), and worked together to incorporate these new ideas and sounds into small group improvisations.

Whole-group improvisations, second time around

We listened to the latest improvisations from the small ‘assignment’ groups, then drew everyone together again for some final whole-group improvisations. We’d heard some wonderfully inventive sounds from each of the sections.

“Let’s aim to have no more than 2 sections playing at a time,” suggested Tony, “until such time as the music demands more. Aim to maintain some space in the music…”

The difference between these improvisations and our earlier whole-group efforts was impressive – the young players now demonstrated a much greater sense of adventure, and a more acute awareness of the playing going on around them. They worked together in sections far more than earlier, and (generally) left a bit of space for other instruments. No-one played all the time.

Handing over responsibility, with a bit of information to get things started

I think that for this age group of young musicians, the range of tasks is key. They are motivated and engaged and will listen to explanations and ‘teacher-talk’; however, their independent work is really impressive. They get straight to task, work incredibly cooperatively, and generate some truly original material. It’s one of those situations where I think the challenge for the adults is to remember to get out of the way! The young people love to get input, but they also thrive on the independence and ownership of the task.

This was the first Toolkit workshop for the KEY program. We have another coming up in two weeks time, and more planned for next year. Each one is led by an Art Orchestra musician on a topic of their own choosing and in their particular area of expertise. As the workshops roll out, I will be logging what approaches and workshop structures are most effective with this age group. Today, the small group work opportunities gave the workshop a particular buoyancy and momentum.

One of my ‘quick start’ workshops is to develop melodic and rhythmic material using a Cycle of 8 beats. The steps are pretty straight-forward:

• Get everyone to count a cycle of 8 steady beats out loud, repeating them over and over in a loop
• Get everyone to clap on 1.
• Ask someone to nominate another number and another sound – at St John’s this week, a student nominated beat 5, and a finger-click.
• Add a few more beats and sounds to the cycle. In a fast-paced workshop it could start to get pretty confusing for the children, but stay with it – this is the preparatory ground for melodic work.
• Around this point I tend to write the 8 numbers up on the whiteboard and put squares around the numbers that we are sounding.
• Decide what tonality you want (or not – you may like to leave it to chance), and ask someone to play the tonic note (or any note) on one of the numbers. At St John’s, I specified the note C on number 1 as I wanted as to have a strong anchoring point, and tonal centre.
• I then invite students (one at a time) to propose pitches for the other numbers in the cycle that we have chosen to sound. By now, we’ll have a melody.
• You can play it on tuned percussion or other instruments as a hocket, or gradually teach the group all the notes in order. I like to leave it up to them to add the other pitches to their starting note when they are ready. Eg. their starting note might be E on beat 4, so they should get that locked in first, but once they feel confident, they might also decide to play the C on beat 1.

At St John’s, a very perky riff in C major emerged. The music teacher and I accompanied it on guitars with a chord progression that moved from C to G, Am, F, and G. We finished the hour-long workshop with a structure – giving each section of instruments (glockenspiels, xylophones, boomwhackers, etc) four repeats of the riff (the number was dictated by the length of the chord progression), before a final section of everyone playing together.

It was hard work for all the students. Some didn’t manage to sort out the whole of the riff in the time we had available. However, they all had an understanding of how we had come to this point in the course of the hour and felt incredibly pleased with themselves and their work. I don’t think they’d played any phrases this long on the tuned percussion before. Also, the guitar accompaniment gave their riff a stronger context and sense of tension and release in the music.

The plan now is that the riff will form melodic material for a ‘school song’ that we will write with one of the older classes next week. The workshop was complete within itself, but the material that it generated will go on to have a longer life elsewhere in the school.

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.

The trailer gives you a taste. It’s one of those films that I want to be able to watch all over again, but for the first time.

Also over the last few days I’ve been working on ideas for the AccessFest workshops (AccessFest is a series of music projects for people with disabilities in Armidale NSW that I’m directing) – we are going to explore a theme of Strength, and Being Strong. I’ve been coming up with simple musical ideas and strategies to help us develop some new music for performance. I’m also compiling a list of music material that we can adapt. One idea – in fact the whole idea of Strength – came from a short performance that some of my Melbourne Uni students created, inspired by the Maya Angelou poem Life doesn’t frighten me at all. They sang that title/refrain to the tune of Funge Alafia, a children’s song from West Africa that I’d taught them earlier in the semester. It’s a catchy melody and the words fit perfectly, so I’m planning on using that up in Armidale.

Here are some photos from the weekend: