Our Band with Rosewood Free School Southampton

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) has completed the first year of Our Band a two year programme working in special schools in King’s Lynn, London, Southampton and in Plymouth, with students from Plymouth City College.

The OAE team on Our Band comprises our Education Director, Cherry Forbes, composers, animateurs and OAE players. Taking Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas as our starting point, we supported children and young people to create their musical response to this material which they performed to fellow pupils and family, alongside the OAE team who had worked with them over the year. 

Here, animateur Ignacio Agrimbau tells us about Our Band at Rosewood Free School, one of the few schools in England where provision is mostly focused on the specific sensory, social, learning and physical needs of students with profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD). Ignacio works regularly in the school and so is a key member of the OAE team there, with his knowledge of the students and continued presence for them.

Our Band was a transformative experience for all of the parties involved at Rosewood and I have reflected upon planning processes, my collaboration with OAE musicians, and our interactions with the school. It presented opportunities, challenges and (therefore) different avenues for learning and exploration.

In previous projects where the OAE collaborated with the school, participation involved students with less severe learning difficulties; they were therefore more independent, and it was possible to explain to them what we were doing. The decision to include PMLD Year 2 students in Our Band was made in consultation with head-teacher Zoe Evans. Even though I was familiar with the types of intervention and workshop methods used in PMLD settings, having to adapt these to a rendition of Dido, including the adaptation of the piece’s parts, and the performance of these by OAE musicians, presented a new challenge. Having said this, project manager Cherry Forbes had already anticipated that Rosewood’s unique qualities demanded a different approach, and considered the possibility of using the piece’s materials to create an installation that was informed by the students’ music-making. The challenge was, therefore, to find a way to integrate the students’ musicality, preferences and responses as a form of aesthetic agency; that is, as a statement that tells us how or when to play and re-compose Purcell’s music. The challenge involved a stimulating combination of workshop leading, performance and compositional methods.

The students loved music and were highly responsive to it. However, learning repertoire (however simplified), or running prompt-based activities, would have been an unfair challenge; especially, it would have missed the outlets of expression and creativity that were more meaningful to them. Students could vocalise, move, or activate sound devices in response to, but also as a trigger for, our instrumental or vocal contributions. Moreover, their musical engagement was not conceptualised by them (neither it should be by us) as a neatly distinguishable part of their sensory and social experience. They made music with us as they initiated, responded to or maintained satisfying interactions, or sources of sensory feedback. Using a child-centred approach, informed by principles of intensive interaction, sensory integrative routines, or psychodynamic improvisation, we started to nuance, alter and adapt materials from Dido on the basis of our interactions. This was not an easy process. I was used to implementing these techniques on my own, but guiding musicians to use them, and encourage them to implement them during workshops, while avoiding giving too many instructions, was a challenge. I wanted this approach to underpin our delivery, but not to get on the way of the spontaneous creativity, great skills and responsiveness of the OAE musicians.

Adapting the materials was not easy, at first it was clear that using notated or memorised music as a raw material for spontaneous improvisation was, at times, difficult. Interaction seemed to inspire spontaneous interpolations of random materials, rather than variations of Purcell. Nonetheless, some workshop methods were gradually assimilated and implemented by the musicians with the required plasticity. Particularly, we made great progress after organising a few jamming and recording sessions, in which we practiced improvisation strategies on the basis of the types of interactive playing with which we had experimented during workshops. Retrospectively, I think (in agreement with comments made by the musicians), that we should have had these sessions in advance, so that opera fragments could have been more deeply assimilated as improvisation material, previous to the workshops.

As I mentioned above, it was at times complex to find a balance between encouraging musicians to feel free to use their initiative, creativity and experience, while having enough consistency in our workshop approach, particularly in relation to the performance methods required to allow students to nuance Purcell’s music. Particularly at first, musicians found it difficult to simplify and space their playing, in order to allow enough space for student feedback to come through, or for students to hear more of themselves. Using our listening skills as an integrative part of what we play is easier said than done, specially as we were trained to (and regularly expected to) spend more time playing than not playing during performances. PMLD sessions present the challenge that in order to identify, celebrate, and build on genuine student involvement, we need to spend a lot of time listening and watching, and to understand that not as passive waiting, but a very active form of engagement with our participants. Having said this, the musicians made impressive progress in this respect, and I was delighted that our most successful, spacious and responsive sessions, were those we delivered in our last two sets of workshops. There were two key events that contributed to this progression. First, the recording and jamming sessions described above; second, a training session which I planned for all of the staff members at Rosewood, but delivered in collaboration with Jo and John (OAE players).

The main priority when deciding on the grouping of the sessions was the involvement of individuals. Again, this was a balancing act, which was brilliantly dealt with by school staff. Whereas we aspired to integrate as many students as possible, the highly complex sensory, physical or behavioural patterns of students sometimes challenged group cohesion. In both classes there were students who, for different reasons, were at times upset during sessions, and expressed their discomfort in ways that affected other students’ involvement. Indeed, it is difficult to allow space for reflective playing, to pick up on small nuances, when a participant is crying and screaming. Nonetheless, these challenges never led to the permanent exclusion of any particular participant; it is important though to reflect on how our aims to integrate students can tackle, but also potentially lead to, participatory discrepancies. Again, Cherry addressed this issue before the sessions started, by allocating part of the funding to regular 1:1 sessions. These enabled me to address individual needs in more detail, and to account for them in the planning of group sessions and the guidance I provided to the OAE musicians.

Finally, I cannot overemphasise how appreciative and supportive the staff at Rosewood Free School have been; from senior administration, to teachers and teaching assistants. Our visits to the school were celebrated as special occasions, and we were encouraged to organise lunchtime concerts for all of the classes. This made a great difference (particularly compared to other projects also focused on specific classes), as it made the whole school aware, and part of, the collaboration.