MMM thoughts from lockdown - 01
Multicultural Music Making is now in its fifth year. I joined the team at Friction Arts last summer, but it was only January onwards when I became fully immersed in all things MMM, and what a joy it has been, despite the strangeness of delivering through a pandemic!
The ambition of MMM is to change the way music education is taught by connecting with the heritage of each of the families we work with, bringing those influences in to shape the sessions. Built around our Principles of Practice MMM focuses on learning, sharing, and creating international music. This term that has led to singing in French, Igbo, Polish, Tagalog, Malay, Swahili and more – and each of the sessions I’ve been fortunate to attend have been alive with vibrant intercultural flair.
Finding ways to deliver MMM during a pandemic has, unsurprisingly, impacted the shape of delivery. There was a brief pause after lockdown was announced where we all blinked at one another metaphorically and wondered ‘okay, what now?’.. But through persevering and reaching out to every single individual we were working with, we knew that what was needed was continued delivery one way or another.
It’s not been perfect. Families across Birmingham have struggled through the pandemic, and the families we engage and the schools we partner with have been some of the hardest hit. Many have no WiFi or have no devices capable of video calls. Some have devices shared across large families. We spoke with every family to figure out what delivery we could offer and whether they could access it – and if the idea of online sessions worked for them. We liaised with our school partners to ensure our project participants who are also keyworker children in school could access sessions. The amazing teachers we’ve worked with have been on a leap-of-faith journey with us to explore what music making over Zoom, complete with latency challenges and the potential of endless echoes, could be like. The MMM team began a series of online musical experiments to test the technology and adapt our activities, before launching our weekly virtual MMM sessions.
During the Summer Term, week after week, children have dialled in to sessions with friends they haven’t seen since March. Teachers have dialled in from classrooms, and we’ve connected them altogether. In a strange world in which nothing is familiar, MMM became a weekly routine these children could rely on, where familiar faces and new sounds awaited. And through it all, we’ve made music and shared songs from all around the world. And it’s been a joy to be a part of. It's also personally been a shining beacon for me during lockdown, seeing the differences we made in the lives of the people we worked with. I've asked our musicians to write about their experiences, and will share them over the forthcoming weeks to share more of the joys and challenges we've experienced.