I’m working on a school project to facilitate the transformation of a school waiting room into a retro computer gamed inspired space. Today’s challenge was to play with 8 Bit sounds (think Mario Kart/Pacman) and produce a simple loop in 30 minutes. Really enjoyed the process.

The young people chose the theme as they want it to become a fun space but inclusive of adults. They chose games ‘old people’ grew up with, yet play themselves. Students associated the room with being in trouble or where parents went to discuss important matters with school. Here’s my playtime results:
marioplaytime

I was soo impressed with the young people at Watville, Wilkes Green and St. James primary schools over the year. This term, we (Steve and I repping Birmingham Jazz) were given such a tall order yet I feel we delivered the goods; I learnt that most of the other primary schools in the music hub (Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Sound It Out, CBSO, THSH) were able to give their schools weekly and some around 8 sessions per term, to develop ensemble and music making skills. In total I had 5 sessions in the spring term, and 3 in the summer, yes 3, which meant we had a mammoth job to do, devise, rehearse and perform at the Town Hall after 4.5 hours, minus ice-breakers, and packing away and you’re left with little time I tell thee, yet we managed to do it. I was proud of the fact the young people devised lyrics before the project, rehearsed outside of lessons, and after a scary sound check on the day after a week’s break, pulled it off!! Go gang!! There were tears, I got told off, necessary hugs were given and received.

In just 8 sessions I found that the young people’s time keeping, ability to improvise and create grooves improved exponentially, I was also impressed with how a teacher got stuck in the project and played recorder on stage with the kids!! How supportive is that!

Areas of improvement: I need to work more on varying my signalling, I wish I had the funds to go on a ensemble leading course, yes, another one, for intermediate workshoppers, I also need to think about using different time signatures, I’ve been using compound time more recently, but haven’t written many pieces in 3/4, I did use 5/4 with some secondary kids last term…. anyho! Onwards and upwards!

Highlights of the project for me were: working with amazing individuals at the aforementioned schools! Thanks young peeps, you rocked my world!

What would have made my life easier on this project: less emailing and more tete a tete (please), meetings with admins and the whole of the team so we could there could be greater consistency across the cluster, more efforts made to incorporate workshop leaders who don’t read music in CPD sessions too, some of my team felt a bit left out.

Here is some media for ya from our rehearsals,courtesy of my iPhone,  you can hear me shouting, teachers getting stuck in lol! I think you can hear an improvement in each school’s pieces.

First piece St. James composed: StJamesfirstpiece

Second piece by St. James, with some recorder playing by Ms. Hanson: StJamesJohnLennonPiece

Watville’s first composition: watvillefirstpiece

Second piece by Watville (second rehearsal): Rainforestpractice

Banded About ‘the first year’ from Mathew Beckett on Vimeo.

Find more photos like this on ‘Banded About’

Today’s session was good, fast paced, pressurised and exceptionally creative. It was our last session and we invited musicians Steve (djembe) and Michael (sax/flute). With year 3 we were able to put the finishes touches on the performance, move it over to the stage (which was something we were hoping to avoid initially but can’t). The year 3s were really good at instructing the musicians to fill out the accompanying music. It was great to see their compositional skills begin to blossom.

Year 4′s session, for me was more stressful, not because the young people weren’t great, they were and always have been, but because I was disappointed I couldn’t recall the piano part for the dog song – should have written it down, and that we still have some finishing touches to add next week, I hoped that like the year 3 session we could make more headways, but alas was not meant to be. Last minute dot.com so it is! I also felt guilty that I wasn’t able to utilise the musicians enough in that session, as we spent most the time devising last bits and bobs.

As Chris and Michael pointed out, the year 4 session itself was successful for a number of reasons,  the interminable enthusiasm from Mr. Harwood, who has volunteered to help us with the last drama part of the performance, the young people’s song writing, lyric writing skills getting stronger and the fact that everyone is committed to being a part of it all!

Michael, noted that the session had a huge emphasis on the young people’s creativity, which is great, because I’d rather more ideas from the young people and a slightly less polished performance, than me writing it all, and it appearing glossy, but less input from the children.

Fingers and toes crossed for our memory banks next week!

A groove we made up with year 4, it’s all about clouds: Metalophone

Steve and I singing the year 3 song, so they can have it memorised for next week, there’s a reason why Steve and I aren’t singers, obvious in the recording, but someone has to do it!! HomeSweetHome Here you go year 3!!

I found a lonely looking metallophone in the store room, tuned it to a minor scale so we could create dream like sounds. Has a really sonorous sound, really mellow, perfect for our opening scene.

Both year 3 and 4 teachers said they enjoyed the sessions, Ms. Wilson said she liked seeing how we made headways and I sense more comfortable about what the performance will look like. I tried loads to get Mr. Harwood leading the musicians, but due to time limitations and the complexity of the kids ideas, had to take over leading. I am really keen to play piano as well as getting the young people playing, but the need a strong pulse, maybe with the addition of musicians on Thursday it will allow for this. Highlight was writing a chorus and verse in 15 mins, it went well, Chris has displayed some excellent lyric writing skills. (A published poet didn’t you know?).

In terms of working in partnership with Chris, I feel it’s going really well, both have similar tricks up the sleeve and give one another space to lead, as well as opportunities to jump in with suggestions.

The sessions were both successful, we were limited again in time as we had two assemblies that took off half an hour of time, but we got the backbone of devising drama and music performances; we always share at the end. I really enjoyed facilitating the dog song sketch; written in just 10 mins inspired by a tale of being unfortunate with pets (Chris and I became interviewees in the afternoon, I spoke about accidentally killing goldfish as a child, rottweilers etc). Props to Mr Harwood for the conducting and counting in! It’s great to see our year 4 teacher is gaining more confidence in leading, it would be great to work with staff and develop their ensemble leading, I think they are naturals!!  woofwoof

Hearing about the recent GCSE music exam paper blunder brought back memories. It was quite fascinating to witness the development of the exam papers, but filling out spreadsheets to update the refinements: really boring!!

There was quite a discussion on the TES forum.

How on earth are OCR going to rectify the problem? They can’t make the students retake the exam!

It is meant to be a festival that brings together music practitioners and educators from informal and formal settings as well as a mammoth professional development event and I desperately wanted to go. Unfortunately I had workshops to deliver- sniffle.

It also doesn’t come cheap; at £175 for a day and up to £395 for the whole thing- ouch! The Classroom of the Future session looked exciting- it’s definitely time more traditional music educators cast aside their fears and embrace the wealth of opportunity music tech offers.

So, if anyone has attended please get in touch, I would love to hear about it.

Really looking forward to creating new sounds with new people!

Cheers to Sid Peacock for hiring me!

Check the myspace for more info.

According to a trusted friend of mine, Apple now do a deal where you pay £80 a year which lets you go in for an hour’s tuition on anything software related whenever you want, its really useful and the creatives are really good apparently.

I am also getting closer to attaining my dream of working with an organisation that I have admired since 12 to deliver an exciting music project. I won’t say who they are until it is concrete, but, I am becoming slightly more excited!

‘Bass Culture’ is going really well, we have had hardly any hiccups, which is reassuringly nice. After weeks of not knowing when Apple were going to deliver 16 Imacs from its new eastern distribution arsenal- they finally arrived- and were installed after 2 weeks. We were able to take participants through the basic of Logic Express- using loops to affiliate participants with the program. It all seems to be making sense- applying the beats and skills learnt in practical activities to virtual music software.

I am really enjoying the sessions- there is one group in particular, a year nine class that bedazzle me with their intellect and great attitudes. They have the maturity to actively take part in all exercises; they are open-minded and know quite a fair bit about black music. There are two quiet, gentle lads, who melt my heart each week- they exude such a warmth and genuine quality. So far, every time they have displayed their work to me, I start gushing like a pregnant woman watching a schmaltzy US film. I am sure they think I am weird.

The music teaching is going okay- having to up my game each week, and my voice projection is getting better, getting deeper and louder- soon I shall be giving the late Barry White a run for his money!!

One thing I am really not nailing hard is the publicity/marketing side. How I loathe it! The sarcastic school secretaries, the self-promotion, being vulnerable to whether people want to buy into your ‘product’- yuck!! Yet it is a total necessity- Music Leader are doing a really good networking/ buyers meet sellers marketplace, yet I cannot setup a stall as it falls on a school day and I simply cannot get to Wolvs on time. Booo!!

The Djing is going okay, but, I would not mind more gigs around the UK or abroad- it has been over a year since we started up at the Bull’s Head- time for MFG! development. Stupid Djing question of the month- asked whilst I am playing a funk 45.

Drunk, quite stylish punter: ‘Do you have anything that’s like really old?’

Me: ‘Like how old?’

Punter: ‘Like 15 years old, nothing modern’.

Me: ‘This is about 40 years old’.

Punter: ‘Yeah, you know what I mean’.

I really didn’t. I retold the story to Sister 45 and we sighed. Drunk people; they say the funniest things!

At one of the schools I worked at I was told to work on my voice projection. Apparently my voice is not low enough! So time to work on that. Although I was hostile to the idea at first.

Through the hindrances and frustrations at working at a particularly challenging school, I have learned that when I devise more projects I have to make sure that the venue is suitable for participants and that the facilities are available the day I am there!!!

I am really enjoying my sessions at AI School. The students are really starting to understand the joys of being creative, they are lovely people and have lots of good ideas.It makes me happy to be a workshop leader!

The RESPECT programme is finally on my doorstop which is excitingt!!

I have also had a meeting with Kingstanding 610 community centre and will be setting up projects for them over the Easter period. I have also gained work interest from James Brindley School doing Brazilian/world music workshops.

I have loads to do, proposals, budgets, more interviews, just need more hours in the day to get on top of all this!!

I also had a meeting with the head of music at my old secondary school and we bounced ideas as to how to get more of the Gifted and Talented students in year nine to take GCSE music through music workshops.

I am still finding working at PB school difficult, some of the other classes are starting to understand the value of being creative and are taking the sessions more seriously, but there is one class at the end who are really trying to make it hard for me and the teacher to get past the warm up stage of our lesson plan. It is like they are immune to the teacher’s shouting. It is such a contrast to the other schools I work out where discipline is not an issue; especially when both schools I atteneded had hardly any disciplinary issues at all.

I am perfecting my proposal writing skills and am working out exactly how much I should charge for the planning and preparation of my projects.

The Respect Programme music mentoring scheme should be kicking off rather soon too!

I am working with the Performing Arts teacher of Perry Beeches School to give some of the year 8 and 9 students an opportunity to experience the joys of music. Some of the groups I am working with seem disengaged with education and for most teachers behavioural issues occur frequently. Quite a few participants were on report or were given detentions.

It is definitely going to be a challenge to make these students become creative and motivated about music. At present it is difficult to move from behaviourist or teacher led activities let alone to more cognitive exercises. I will persevere!!

I will have to have to engage with the ring leaders to a certain degree to get the pace of workshops faster.

The fact that my two teenage sisters had myspace accounts before me, know how to attach html to blogs and webpages, are knowledgeable about: Bebo, Flickr, IRC, Piczo, Podcasts, Facebook and Wikis made me realise I am a digital dinosaur.

If parents fail to become PC literate they can often loose touch with a large part of their child’s life. Should the responsibility of monitoring young people’s Internet usage fall onto the schools? I think not, and too many parents are not being active enough in this digital domain. My parents have only recently started to ‘get into’ PCs. My mum made her first email account last year to communicate with an overseas cousin.

This study investigates and addresses myths and misconceptions about digital technologies. It explores issues of moral panic and digital faith such as:

The Internet is too dangerous for children
Junk culture is poisoning young people and taking over their lives.
All gaming is good.
All children are cyberkids.

The most beneficial part of the study suggested that schools could address educational issues if they tried to blur or bridge together formal and informal learning contexts. This is because they would be key to creativity and assisting in ‘new models of learning such as peer- to -peer exchanges’. It stated that we need to have greater confidence in the skills young people possess since they have greater levels of self-reflection and awareness then we realise.

I think that through community music and as a practitioner working alongside music teachers I have greater freedom to address some of the key issues mentioned in this study in my music workshops:

Exploration of the relationships between students and their formal education experience, helping schools to make this more meaningful and engaging.

Helping schools understand the deeper relationship young people have with social networks outside of school.

Helping to bridge the two worlds of formal and informal learning and assisting in connecting the two different learning experiences.

I think music can be a great tool in linking formal and informal learning.

To date, 3 out of 3 schools have asked. I shall see if anymore try and rope me in!!

I did a lot of things that I shouldn’t have: not given enough ground rules about using instruments etc. I did manage to get quite a few things right. I learned about classroom management, how challenging it can be to handle a class of rowdy teenagers and the pressures of trying to get things done within a very tight time limit. I also had do a lot of improvising, stuck around later than I was meant to, become music director and so forth. I was shattered by the end.

I did achieve most of my objectives; I got 20 key stage 3 students to write a piece of music based on Chinese harmonies and melodies, and after gallons of sweat poured manged to produce after 3 hours a piece presentable for 400 people to watch!

Many thanks are needed for the support and advice from music teacher Catherine Broadway for her support and help!