What I’ve learnt on Quench Arts’ Interface project by Kai Chareunsy (Young Music Leader)
My name is Kai Chareunsy, I’m a drummer and composer working as a performer mostly in jazz and improvised music, and as a composer in electro-acoustic music. My skills include a strong technical ability on my instrument, and a good understanding of music production in Ableton Live.
My role in Interface has been quite varied, sometimes I will be at the drums playing and taking on the role of band leader, or sometimes I might be walking around spending a bit of time with students on each instrument. The Interface Project involves the young music leaders (plus 2 lead music leaders0 working alongside young people in a band, creating music collaboratively and allowing students to shape the direction of the piece. We have been working towards a studio session and video recording to document our work.
This project has developed my musical skills though working with and learning from people with completely different musical backgrounds. The four young music leaders, including myself, make up a very eclectic mix of musicians, with different tastes, skills, and approaches. With so many different opinions, at first, the pieces we were making were quite erratic and didn’t have a proper cohesive identity. However, as we have progressed I think that we found an effective way of working together to make music that sounds like a proper band. This is through better understanding each other’s viewpoints and backgrounds, and learning how to use each person’s individual skills effectively.
In terms of learning tech, it has been helpful for me to have the lead music leaders input when looking at new bits of tech, such as the hardware synthesiser. It was a good experience to be taught about this instrument, and then quite quickly having to teach it to a younger person. This quick turnaround really helped to strengthen my knowledge. I was also lucky that one of the other music leaders uses Ableton Live a lot, so I was actually able to pick up a lot from watching them teach.
For this project it has been important that the young people feel like they’re part of a band, so making sure that they are learning but without it feeling like a formal lesson was something new to me. I feel like this aspect of my music facilitation skills have become much stronger, being able to quickly create an atmosphere of co-learning and making sure the student feels that they’re contributing equally to the work. This is something that we have spoken about on New Horizons CME training, so it putting into practice have been great, and the same thing goes for other topics such as inclusion, differentiation, and learner agency. Having the Interface project running alongside the New Horizons CME course has been a great way to strengthen the learning as everything remains fresh. I feel that through this project I have found a type of teaching that I really enjoy and gained the confidence to seek out more opportunities for this type of work. I would like to specialise my teaching more from now on, working with tech, improvisation, and jazz as much as possible, and trying to find opportunities to do this within the organisations I am working with. I would also like to create some facilitation opportunities myself though some of the gigging work I am doing. This is further down the line but I would like to use my experience in this area to maybe start visiting schools and delivering workshops on jazz and improvisation.