Lifesize: Looking back at our first year of project delivery; Beginnings, a community music all day event for young people living in northeast Hastings
Our first project was a one-day jam session extravaganza in February 2020 featuring music making workshops for young people from the Ore Valley area of Hastings. We are thankful to Big Local northeast for supporting one of our first community music projects. This was one of our first pieces of project work and it preceded the pandemic by only a couple of months or so, as a new organisation we were about to have to completely reconfigure our methodology but for now life was relatively normal prior to Covid 19 as we prepared and developed one of our first company projects
We wanted to devise and deliver an engaging one-day programme of music for wellbeing in collaboration with the GAP project that have been active supporting the local young people for quite some time. The GAP project has been providing a number of creative, fun and educational programmes, we wanted to bring something complimentary to this group of young people. We teamed up with local drumming workshop leaders as well as rap tutors from the inspirational organisation Audio Active
Our day involved running a carousel of activities; Music making with guitars and keyboards, drumming, lyric writing/singing and rapping.
All three elements came together at the end of the day with a performance/jam where all the participants got the chance to share their musical discoveries. It proved to be a fruitful day with original drumming and live instrument compositions being combined with raps made throughout the day. A huge thankyou to our associate artist facilitators who brought their specialist knowledge and expertise to the event making it a unique and memorable day for the young people
Here is some of the feedback we received
The GAP project:
‘GAP was amazed at the impact of the learning model Lifesize uses to teach instruments. The kids found this a doddle and where paying chords and tunes on the keyboard in ten minutes, Fabulous. We would love to work with these great musicians again’
Rap/Lyrics associate artist:
‘The session went really well I thought. Every young person was engaged and enthusiastic when contributing to our song writing tasks. P has some very interesting concepts to write about and chose "mysteries" as her final topic. J and F also wrote an anti-bullying piece and shared some of their own personal experiences with bullies, which I found to be quite brave of them. All in all, a great session and even better that they were all confident enough to bring it together at the end and share with the rest of the group. Thumbs up all round!’
