Perspectives of a project trainee
During City of London Sinfonia's recent Tower Hamlets Key Stage 1 project, we asked our project trainee Jon Farey, a postgraduate student at the Royal Academy of Music, to outline exactly what the project entails. With fully-grown professional musicians dressed as horses and children commissioning the music, it would seem that all roles are reversed in these workshops. One thing for sure though is that it looks like a lot of fun! Jon tells all….
My name is Jon Farey, I am a postgraduate horn player at the Royal Academy of Music and through the Open Academy I was given the opportunity to be a trainee animateur on the project detailed below with the City of London Sinfonia. It was brilliant to see how the project developed and to be given the chance to lead some sections of the workshops – my career aims are to become an animateur, whilst continuing to develop my horn playing to the highest standard, and the project gave me some really valuable experience – I was constantly amazed at how receptive the children were and I have come away from the project full of new ideas and enthusiasm for inspiring new generations of musicians.
The aim of the project was to gear up years 1 and 2 primary school children for one of their first concert experiences. In order to help the children interact with the performance, they created their own song that was performed to the other schools.
The concert had a set theme of ‘Animals’. We used this theme throughout the concert and in the sessions leading up to the concert – we created a story loosely based on Noah’s Ark, where the animals had to get on a boat (we had to ‘find’ the animals in the orchestra); once the animals were on the boat we made it rain using rain song that was created with and performed by the children, and finally we needed wind to make the sail on the boat move – to do this the children mimicked the woodwind and brass players in the orchestra in holding/blowing a long note.
The song that the children helped to create was based on sentences created by the children in one of the first sessions – almost everyone created sentences asking for the sky to rain and it was amazing to hear the poetic and thoughtful sentences that the children managed to think up in such a short space of time. Claire Bloor, the workshop leader, had noted these sentences down and then created a song using some of them. Each school then had their different words to learn and a song was created, with each school singing a verse and chorus each. Initially a word sheet was given to each school along with a recording of myself and Claire playing/singing the music so that preparation by each school could be done for the next session. By the concert each school had learnt their section of the song and were accompanied by the City of London Sinfonia whilst performing the song to the other schools.
As well as the schools performing the song in the concert, we also introduced the schools to the instruments in the orchestra using the animal theme and the music in the concert. Each piece in the concert highlighted a certain instrument and had a certain animal – the musicians in the City of London Sinfonia all had small props symbolising the animals they represented (favourites with the children were the trumpet and horn as horses and the oboe and clarinet as chickens – the pieces representing them were Rossini’s William Tell Overture and Mussorgky’s Ballet of the Chickens in their Shells from Pictures at an Exhibition respectively). In the session before the concert some of the City of London Sinfonia players came to the workshop and demonstrated their instruments to the children whilst performing reduced versions of some of the pieces played in the concert – this really helped the kids to be more comfortable and familiar in the concert and they were able to recognise both the musicians and the instruments that they played.
In the sessions leading up to the concert, it was fantastic to be given the opportunity to work with Claire and to have the chance to lead parts of the sessions. It was really fun leading some of the warm ups with the kids and I was always surprised by their responsiveness and attentiveness. As well as some of the warm ups I did in the sessions, Claire introduced some of the concepts that were to be used in the concert – for example, the children create raindrops with their hands and then had to search for the animal they were looking for. One of my favourite elements of the sessions were Claire’s method of gaining the children’s attention – at the start of each session she made all the children start as number ones: people who hadn’t got my sleep, hadn’t had breakfast, were slouching etc, and then made them turn into number 5s (those who’d had some sleep, a bit of breakfast, slightly slouching) and then number 10s (straight back, lots of sleep and a good breakfast).
A big thank you to the City of London Sinfonia team for such a fun workshop series!