Writing a song with Our Lady and St Thomas on their Hopes and Dreams.

Hello My name is Brendan I am a youth music trainee at Jack Drum arts and I have been working with Jack Burton the new lead Youth Music Coordinator at Jack Drum Arts during the 6 weeks of the summer term of 2021. We had been working on writing and recording a song with Class 4 from Our Lady St Thomas R.C. Primary for their end of year event OLST Fest.

In the first week the session was very positive. Jack and I went into the workshop eager to help these children write a song and they responded with equal excitement. There were many suggestions about what they wanted the song to be about such as space, farms, family and many others so this was a big challenge to boil them all down so that we got as many ideas in there as possible so that we weren’t leaving any of the children out of the project or making them feel their ideas weren’t good enough. This wasn’t the only challenge to overcome however as although I have done workshops with children of this age before I have never been in a classroom setting and done formal teaching. It has been a big learning curve going from being in my comfort zone of informal teaching of more rock music to now helping a classroom of 26 students all write a song together with 26 different brains each coming up with lots of ideas of their own that they want to be included in the song.

As we progressed into week 2 we were able to work with the young people and come up with 4 main categories of ideas that they would work on in groups later on which were space, home and family, nature and sport. As these were brought up a lot in a lot of the idea writing activities that were used in the sessions. A part of this process that I enjoyed was walking around the room and seeing the ideas that some of the children had ranging from living on a farm with pigs and chickens to the outright ridiculousness of playing rugby on a rugby pitch in hell with a sloth. It was great to see the creativity flow within the children as they got more comfortable with the task in hand. 

The class has also been teaching Jack and I a song too that we hope to perform with them at their end of year festival. This song is called The Swords Of A Thousand Men. I think this was really beneficial as it gave the children a sense that I am not here to just show them how to write a song and leave as it’s my job. I’m here to help them create something, to inspire them, to help give them something they can be proud of and hold in their memories or even spark an interest in the arts that they might not have had before. 

I think my favourite part of the project so far is being able to see the progression within the children from at the start being quite shy and reserved to now recording their own sound effects into a microphone with the class. Not only this but seeing how much they are enjoying seeing these thoughts that they scribbled on a piece of paper come to life and take the form of a song properly recorded into software and sounding professional standard. I love this as so many children don’t get this opportunity to be able to create and make things like this. Yes they can make stuff in arts and crafts and maybe learn violin or guitar but to write and record your own song on professional software would have completely blown my mind as a child. 

I am so excited for this song to be complete and to hear how the children have found working with myself and jack on it. But most importantly to hear how they like the song that they have written and to be able to perform it for the whole school and their parents in a couple of weeks time at OLST fest.

OLST Fest was a blast! There wasn’t a sad face at the whole event. All of the children were dancing and singing their songs, it was a really nice refreshing event to take part in. At first I felt a bit anxious as I haven’t really done anything like this before and performed at a school like this however as the event went on I started to feel better about the performance and helping with the tech side of things with Jack too. I think the most rewarding part of this whole project really was seeing how much of an impact it has had on these young people. Seeing them write their own song and being quite shy about it at first to being absolutely ecstatic about performing it made me feel warm inside and gave me a sense of feeling that me and Jack really have helped these children out we really have helped them create something they are proud of.