Rhythmix Arts Award Case Study
It’s Arts Award Week! To Celebrate 10 years of Arts Award we thought we’d share a recent case study of a project which had Arts Award Discover embedded within it. Tutors Dave Tribe and Saffa Ghorishi worked with Project Manager Jo Bates and Arts Award Advisor Cicely Taylor at an Alternative Education settings. They supported a group of young people to achieve the accreditation and a whole range of other outcomes.
Overview
As part of the end of our ELER (Elevated Risk Youth Music Module) Arts Award Discover was offered to a group of young men in a specialised residential school in Crawley via sessions with Rhythmix tutors and an Arts Award advisor. Four young men took part in a number of music production workshops and songwriting/ lyric writing/ freestyle rapping. In addition to this, the young men had been taking part in a range of creative activities with other arts tutors that term and this evidence was able to be used towards their Arts Award.
Music at the center was not as in depth as Rhythmix Sessions are. The opportunity to work with a professional music producer and Rap MC inspired the young people and helped them to engage in a more motivated, creative and explorative way. Participants were able to access high quality music technology hardware and software and to gain experience of live recording and music editing in a professional setting.
The offer of Arts Award Discover in this setting helped in a number of ways
- providing a structure for the evidence collation
- motivating the young people by offering the opportunity to gain accreditation
- helping to focus the mode and approach to the work created
- encouraging a deeper discourse with the participants regarding the artistic processes they had gone through and the new skills that they had learnt, both creative and transferrable.
Arts Award Elements
Take Part/ Discover: all of the young men either wrote an instrumental track using music technology, wrote lyrics or freestyle rapped. This was the first time that any of them had accessed this type of music making activity.
Research/ Find Out: the young people had been working with a street artist, researching Banksy. They were also able to find out about the career paths of the Rhythmix tutors.
Share: the young people performed their pieces to each other and their support workers, which were recorded, put onto a CD and also filmed. The tracks will be able to be put up on the Rhythmix SoundCloud so that the young musicians are able to share their work with others.
Mike* - Case Study
Mike’s song was inspired by what it’s like to be involved in ‘trapping’ (drug culture) in London, where all people talk about is ‘trap’ and making money, but Mike wanted to talk about his personal life and focus his mind on that: “You hardly hear anyone talking about life and that’s what my rap’s all about: talking about my life, what’s happening, what I go through daily.”
Mike described how it felt to freestyle rap for the first time: “It’s just the flow… when you say ‘fly’ and you automatically come out with ‘high’ and then ‘see that light in the sky’ and it’s so easy and it then it will just flow off your head and you don’t even even know you’re doing it. And then you go, yeah that was good, and you try and write it down, and you forget!”
Then to turn that freestyling into lyrics: “Yeah, I change it. I end up forgetting it (when I try to write it down), and then I’ll write little bits onto it and it’ll sound better.”
His sense of musicality had grown, adapting his rapping to different backing tracks: “If I’ve done it to a certain instrumental, I’ll try to change it up... break it down, pause it to fit, you have to change the tone, change voice with different words.” Mike spent a lot of his free time between sessions working on his piece, helped by Mandla (support worker): “I’ll put on my headphones, listen to the instrumental and I’ll rap, and Mandla will write it down, and then I’ll read through it, add little bits in to make it better, editing.”
He organised his work with two papers for his different drafts: “blue for real and white for little (ad lib) parts”, and then put them together: “When I’d finished the lyrics, I was freestyling, it was just the flow for the last bar, and you just keep going and you don’t even know what you’re saying, it just comes off your head, it was rhyming.”
It didn’t bother him being recorded, in fact Mike found that the adrenalin of being recorded helped: “When you’re focused on it, you think ‘I can’t get this wrong’, with the pressure, and you end up ‘going in’ and then you don’t even know (that they are recording).”
Mike discovered he learnt some unexpected things about the process of lyric-writing: “I thought I was bad at English, but you need English for it, because you need more words, and then then the words you know, then they will come into the poetry. So the more words you know, and what the meaning is, the more words you can talk about with it.”
Music Skills Development: creativity, self-expression and musical ability
We offered a platform for the young people to express themselves creatively, in a flexibly structured way that was user-led, the participants engaged very positively with the experience and they quickly discovered a talent in freestyle rap, rhyming words easily as they improvised and displaying strong lyrical and rhythmical abilities. This new found talent was something that they seemed to really enjoy.
The young people were encouraged to reflect on the creative processes they had been through which was used as evidence for the Arts Award Discover. The young people were interviewed by the Arts Award advisor in a ‘radio interview’ set up using audio recording equipment on a mobile phone. Some of the young people really responded to being interviewed in this way and very much opened up to talk about the music that they had made, the subject content, how it felt to be learning a new skill and how it felt to have this as a medium for expressing things about their personal lives. Some other participants felt nervous about being interviewed because the associated the word interview with being questioned by the police or being interviewed for a new job, so in these cases it was conducted in a more informal way via conversation and notes were taken. Participants were also asked how they felt about continuing on the musical career path and the majority were interested.
Self-efficacy and resilience: self-esteem, skills, engagement and confidence
Some of the participants chose to use the opportunity to speak about some of their personal challenges and private experiences through freestyle rapping and lyric writing. Music Leader Saffa had suggested to the young people that they could use music and lyrics as a medium for expressing their feelings about difficult issues that they had experienced their personal life. Mike’s case study is further evidence of this.
The participants confidence developed in the supportive environment which was created by the tutors with support from the TBAP support workers who were people that they trusted. Encouraged by the tutors, they all produced some very individual pieces of music and were able to express some of the difficulties of their private lives and challenges of the environment that they lived in. The opportunity to engage with music as a medium for emotional expression was a new tool for the young people which could contribute towards future resilience and self-regulation. In terms of learning new skills and talents, this seemed to be something that raised the self-esteem of the participants.
One of the support workers, commented “It's been really great, the lads have really enjoyed the sessions. They've been really productive and engaged.”
Improved life chances
The project with Rhythmix offered the young people an opportunity for sustained participation in music making which presented them with opportunities to gain new skills that were transferable and could help improve their life chances, as well as the option to forge a career in the arts in the future. The extra advantage that Arts Award offered to gain accreditation via the project was a motivating factor for young people to focus and engage more deeply. Other transferable skills gained through the process could be seen to increase the young people’s opportunities in life. Mike’s case study is further evidence of this.