YMCA Digital - Music Leader Blog
YMCA Digital – Trainee Music Leader Blog
Pete Beardsworth - 2018-05-22
During spring term 2018, we decided to trial a new formula for the music sessions: creating 10-week courses in which the same young people would turn up on the same day of the week each week. The aim of the 10-week courses was to be able to create more continuity between the sessions, allowing for a deeper level of engagement with the young people involved. I was running Monday’s ‘Big Band’ session and supporting Shaan’s ‘Vocal Zone’ session on Fridays.
We were given planning time for a couple of sessions before the 10 weeks started. I used this time to think about the trajectory of the course: what did I want my young people to have gained by the end of the 10 weeks? I decided that what I wanted most of all was for them to have gained new ways of thinking about music - to be able to approach making music and playing their instrument from different perspectives. I felt that the best way of achieving this would be to focus on a different attitude to playing in each session: by focussing on harmony, rhythm, melody, songwriting, vertical lines (harmony and rhythm), horizontal lines (melody, harmony, rhythm) and then integrating all the approaches, my plan was to totally rebuild my young peoples’ approach to music-making! Needless to say, it didn’t quite turn out like that.
During my first session I was explaining and using examples to describe some basic harmonic movement to my group of young people when I realised for what felt like the hundredth time in my teaching career that when it comes to music, explaining is much less good than doing. I realised that what I was doing to my group of mixed age, speciality, and ability, was alienating some, boring others, and highlighting the differences in technical know-how between the young people. Through my career as a professional musician, I understand first-hand that theoretical knowledge often doesn’t correlate with ability or intuitive understanding. So what was I doing right at the beginning of my first session making it appear as if a theory was the only way into music making? Very soon I ditched my lesson plan for that week and simply got everyone involved in a jam.
The intensity of this first jam was remarkable, and simply through the process of dealing with the topics that came up, I felt I imparted more practical knowledge than I could have done lecturing about harmony for two hours. The first lesson was simply about space! My young people were playing too much, playing over each other without really listening to each other, and were nervous to stop and give each other space. I suggested that one well-placed note every four bars was better than any number of notes played unthinkingly. In my own keyboard playing, I cut back to absolute basics, playing in only the most essential way. When my guitarist found a groovy but hectic rhythm part, I suggested he played half of it and left the other half silent. In this way, a lot of space was created in the jam, and we ended up with some big, exciting pauses in which nobody was playing!
The other lesson which developed from the jam was about feeling: when I suggested a basic four on the floor groove to my drummer he rolled his eyes a little and played, mechanically, that same groove back to me. The ensuing jam was very flat. When it came to a close, I talked a little about feel: I suggested that there should be nothing more enjoyable to a drummer than to hold down a basic groove really focussing on the feeling of push and pull within the beat itself. I played the same beat back to my drummer with as much feel as I could muster: he got the message and began to play with real nuance. By the end of the session, the group was playing music with the spaciousness and good feel - a result beyond my expectations!
In the following sessions, I continued the plan of focusing on a particular aspect or approach each time, now with the understanding that my ideas about how the session would go would likely as not be derailed, and that this would end up with my group learning more, not less! In some of the sessions, the focus remained in the ‘right’ place: for instance, in the rhythm week, we began jamming on percussion instruments and then took the same approach to our regular instruments, to great effect. In the week we were supposed to be working on songwriting, we ended up discussing and working on harmony in some depth!
I realised that what I was teaching to my young people was an attitude of openness, curiosity, patience and flexibility. These, not any technical know-how, make a person great to jam with. It’s the nature of creative pursuit that you never know where you’re going to end up: if you did, it would be a formulated plan, not creativity. To teach creativity, it’s necessary to let go, sometimes, of what you’re supposed to be teaching. This is why, in these after-school sessions, young people learn so much more than they do in their school music lessons. Because we’re not tied to a syllabus, we can teach led by our intuition and show young people that it’s the attitude they take, and the atmosphere they create and maintain, that makes them valuable, not anything they might know.
Over the course of the sessions, attendance dropped a little, especially after half term. I recently heard from a couple of my group members who had been absent, saying they’re committed to coming more this term. I felt overall that the 10-week programme was a partial success: it did help to create some continuity between the sessions. However, the free, voluntary nature of the sessions, and the situations of some of our young people mean that regular attendance from the same group of young people is difficult to achieve, especially with the interruption of the half-term break. Given that, for the most part, young people will attend (or not) whether they’re signed up or not, I felt that the notion of the ’10 week session’ became more lost as the 10 weeks went on.
In my experience, what gets musicians moving is the prospect of a gig. There was a great gig opportunity at the end of the 10 weeks: at Nottingham Street Food Club on the last Friday. Next time I’d like to focus the group sessions more around this opportunity: perhaps leaving sessions open and flexible for the first 6 weeks, then getting a select few young people to commit to a further 4 weeks rehearsing for a performance at the end of the term. If the standard is high, it’s fun, and the performance opportunities are good, young people would come back at the beginning of the next term anyhow. That’s my proposed formula of how to get the sessions to work on a term-by-term basis: the alternative would be to create continuity by running the sessions throughout the holidays, especially half-terms. This way we could foster a really dedicated, evolving group of young people, and avoid the ebb and flow of young people created by the term-time only sessions.