My Transition from Participant to Music Leader by Positive Labels Birmingham Emerging Music Leader Holly Kehoe - Kingsley
When I first joined a music making project at the SongLab, I was just starting my second year of university. This project was aimed at 16-19 year olds and was an educational course. I was confident in my own musical ability as a songwriter and a musician but felt I could benefit from some more guidance, so I got the opportunity to work on my individual development and focus on specific music tasks that involved collaborating with other talented musicians.
The music sessions were interactive, creative and helped me to develop my skills further. We looked at specific tasks that required us to work together and use our song writing skills to write an original piece or use our ability to re-arrange a song to create a new version of a cover. Collaborating with other musicians in this way was a great experience and was very rewarding when seeing the end results. The sessions helped to broaden my collaboration ability and improve my confidence when working with new people. The sessions also gave me more of an insight on how to be a professional in the music industry and how to write for not only myself but for others too.
All of this helped to improve my confidence when performing and enabled me to feel more comfortable being on stage. It was exciting to see how far I had progressed through my journey with The Song Lab as a participant and I’m very grateful for the amazing platform it has given me so far. As a participant I really grew as an artist and musician. I gained a real passion for working with others; starting out with a blank piece of paper and feeling really proud of the results we achieved at the end of a session.
Following this experience I wanted to see if I could apply my skills in community music sector as I really enjoy working with other people and wanted to inspire them to write music, express themselves. I reached out to SongLab and eventually got the opportunity to take on the emerging music leader role on Positive Labels Birmingham music project, working with young people aged 13 – 19. The aims of the project are to help young musicians gain more confidence, improve their communication skills and help develop their musicianship. I felt honoured to be given such a fantastic opportunity as this is the type of work I am keen to do after I leave university.
In the first few sessions, I started off by shadowing the music leaders to see how they lead the sessions and over time I began leading partly the sessions myself. It was an interesting transition to move from the role of participant into the role of facilitator, but I took on this challenge and have been really enjoying my experience.
As a music leader, I am able to use the skills, techniques and knowledge I have acquired during my own development process, I can share with the participants new ways of song writing, usage of chords, getting them to bring out their creative sides and to help improve their confidence whilst collaborating with others. I also enjoy the live performance opportunities that the participants get, for me it feels amazing to see the young musicians stepping onto the stage and performing a song that they have been working so hard to create. It is incredibly rewarding to help nurture and support musically talented young people in an environment where they can truly release their full potential. I am very proud as a music leader to be a part of their journey and to help them grow just as I did and continue to do every day.