by Author simonsteptoe

Published on

You are here:

An Industrious Lockdown

Thank you so much for Saturday. It was a great success. It is the most  Archie has joined in with anything online since lockdown. He thought the other children and grown-ups were really friendly. It was quite emotional to see him so relaxed in a non-judgemental environment as he struggles in the mainstream world.

[PHOTO: Showcasing, Matei, a star user of our Sound Control software, taking part in one of our Relaxed Singalongs with his mum, Laura.]

As it is now getting on for 10 weeks since the beginning of the lockdown period, it seems like a good moment to sit back and reflect on how our work with children and young people has shifted to the online environment, changing along the way, and still continuing to evolve.

“Industrious” is our current Youth Music Fund B working with the full range of children and young people in challenging circumstances across both Northamptonshire and Rutland. Like so many other Youth Music projects, the majority of the project’s strands focus largely on group participation (although there is also some 1-2-1 work) and this, as many other organisations have no doubt found, presents some specific challenges for collaborations online.

Fortunately, on the very date of the start of the lockdown (i.e. 23rd March) we had already scheduled a training/reflection day for our Musical Inclusion Team. Whilst the original focus had been on professional development for the musicians, we quickly shifted the agenda to a discussion about how to take activities online. The session also gave everyone the first opportunity to experiment with Zoom for music-making, which quickly revealed both the potentials and the flaws of video conferencing apps… and perhaps more precisely, the current speed limitations and latency issues underpinning our online networks.

The majority of the current team are freelance musicians, so at the time (prior to the announcement of the HMRC grant for the self-employed), there was a lot of concern on their part about what lay ahead, especially those who rely on gigs for the majority of their income, and thus this was part of the discussion as well.

At the end of the session, it was clear that the lockdown presents an issue for all the CYP we’re working with. Many suffer from issues of isolation, and may also be in challenging domestic situations… and, of course, the current situation has, in effect, locked them into the very environments that our music activities were designed to give them respite from.

At the moment we seem to have evolved our Zoom provision for groups into three models or approaches:

BROADCAST: This has worked well with all groups, typically focusses around singing, and relies on the music leader “broadcasting” content – e.g. teaching or leading the group through a song, with the group muted, but singing along nonetheless. Initially, we were quite sceptical about whether this would be a viable approach for more than a single session, but it is continuing to work well and creates a social environment to bring CYP together.

One of the best examples we have is where the music leader has prepared all the vocal parts – and backing tracks – themselves… so that everyone gets the feeling of singing along with others in a group… and a band….  albeit not their fellow participants… and not with live musicians!

“NON-MUSIC”?! MUSIC ACTIVITIES: Whilst this is not our favoured approach during normal times, music activities that, ironically, don’t require group music-making, have also been successful – i.e. a song-writing session where the participants focus on composing the lyrics, with the music leader taking on the responsibility of pulling together a melody and some chords.

Of course, with both the previous approaches, participants can make musical contributions – i.e. ones that can be heard by all – and  tends to take place in the form of turn-taking (e.g. “Okay, we’ve all learned the song, who would like to try singing it on their own!” etc.)

HYBRID: This has worked best with slightly smaller groups, especially where the emphasis has been more on instrumental work. We’ve called it “hydrid” because we split the sessions down in small 15-20minute segments, and often run activities that weren’t part of the original offer. For example, with our Wellingborough music club, sessions typically consist of:

  • Catch-up and a lot of chat (“What have you been doing over the last week?”, “What music have you been listening to?”)
  • Music Quiz (making use of Zoom’s “share computer sound” facility)
  • Splitting out into a number of Breakout Rooms… populated each by a music leader… which focuses on a specific task, such as: keyboard tuition, ukulele tuition, song-writing etc.
  • A Final Sharing. And then to finish off, everyone is back into “main room”, and has the opportunity to share what they’ve done on an individual basis. Whilst this is certainly not an unusual or unique thing to do, if’s really about individuals sharing their work and we don’t make any attempt to coordinate individual content into a larger group piece or collaboration as we might normally do.

CONTENT IS KING… OR IS IT?

One of the things that has been talked about in recent years is that “content is king” when it comes to producing online content. And whilst this is no doubt true of everything we all do, we’ve found that nurturing – in YM parlance – the Social Outcome Area has been really critical to everyone enjoying themselves and getting most out of sessions.

One musician put it something like this: “If you want to learn the ukulele, there is plenty of high-quality free content out there on YouTube and the like. What the kids really get out of the online sessions at the moment is social interaction and connectivity.” And this observation has been something of a guiding light for us over the past few weeks. Clearly, we all know the social aspect is important, but there feels like there has been a shift in the balance between each of the different outcome areas: Musical, Personal and Social.

There are many more things to be said about responding to the lockdown situation… but this blog is long enough… and I’ll leave other things for another time....