International intercultural music-making in the West Midlands: the MMM project
As the Multicultural Music Making project invites applications for the role of Project Manager, Creative Director Natalie Mason shares her reflections on the programme's history, partnerships and virtual transformations.
Multicultural Music Making (MMM) is a community music education project based in the West Midlands. It is a programme of culturally responsive music-making that connects with project participants and their families via contemporary and traditional international repertoire. In our weekly sessions, the MMM team of community musicians, composers and teachers work with small groups of KS2 and KS3 children to learn, share and create music together.
Project partnerships
In 2015, I had the rare and wonderful opportunity of designing a new music project, in collaboration with Friction Arts. I had moved back to my hometown of Birmingham in 2012 after completing my Master’s degree in Music and Development at SOAS in London and was working as a freelance musician and researcher. This had been preceded by several years spent working as a creative music facilitator in Cape Town, South Africa, a key time which continues to inform and shape my practice today. I had hoped to weave the learning from the previous years into my work in the West Midlands but found limited opportunities to do this in-depth. This, along with experiences of training and workshops where international music was marginalised or misrepresented, became the motivation for conversations about possible alternatives for community music education. Having recently taken part in their artist development programme, Friction Arts and I decided to form a partnership to develop and design the framework for the Multicultural Music Making project (MMM). I devised the core programme and methodological approach, and Friction Arts provided strategic and creative guidance. We applied to Youth Music for funding and with their financial support, launched the MMM project in 2015.
Since then, MMM has worked with hundreds of children who, between them, have connections to more than fifty countries around the world. In collaboration with them and their families, we have sung, played, listened to, and made a huge variety of music together. We have also danced and moved, shared language expertise, explored and created instruments, eaten meals together and enjoyed termly celebratory performances. Now in its sixth year, the project continues to demonstrate a range of successes from pure joy, to significant personal and academic impact for our participants. We have sustained many of our initial partnerships with schools and families and continue to prioritise consistent small-group weekly session work. However, we have also been able to expand our team of associate and guest artists, partner with new schools and community settings and develop training for musicians, teachers and music hubs. Our music-making has taken place in classrooms, school halls, community gardens, playgrounds, in homes - and more recently on Zoom!
Virtual music-making
The pandemic has brought new ideas and inevitable challenges. It meant that our MMM delivery changed from a tried and tested format to something distant and digital. Despite this, the core motivations and thinking behind our sessions, and the methodology and pedagogy, remains the same. There has been valuable technical learning and skills translation as we begin to understand the world of online music-making, developing ways of enabling synchronous, responsive and interactive music-making from afar. Although we miss the opportunity to work in-person, including our cross-school celebration this Summer (where pupils and families from different schools meet together in one space, with much delicious nosh) we were delighted to be able to move the sharing event and our weekly work online.
Despite these achievements, online working has also had its limitations. As Holly Radford of mac makes music mentioned in a recent issue of Sound Sense's Sounding Board, we share her concern about the inequity of access to technology for children in the region. We plan to continue to address the digital divide experienced by our families and work with other organisations in the city to resolve this wherever possible moving forwards.
Next steps and opportunities
MMM continues to aspire to provide a depth of thinking, sharing, skills and engagement for music that is bespoke, responsive and vital in our changing world. Informed by my PhD research at the University of Birmingham, the MMM project is finding new connections with practice and research within the fields of community music, ethnomusicology and music education. We continue to seek creative opportunities and partnerships across these disciplines, locally and internationally, to enable us to deepen and share the work.
We are currently looking for someone to join our team as a Project Manager for MMM. You can find more information about the role here. Please note that the application deadline is Monday 16th November 2020 at 12pm noon. Feel free to share this with your networks: https://wp.me/p2wtQt-bH
Our thanks to Youth Music for providing this important space for connecting and sharing the work we do.
For more information about the MMM project please email mmm@frictionarts.com or visit the Friction Arts website. You can hear a selected playlist of performances and compositions by MMM musicians here:
