FEATURE FOCUS: CULTURAL EDUCATION
Getting into the groove
Over the last two years I have had the pleasure of working with the Cheltenham Music Festival on their ‘Musicate Programme’ – aimed at improving music education within Primary Schools by allowing classroom teachers and professional musicians to collaborate on regular music workshops for school children. An additional part of this programme is the ‘Workshops in Schools series’ which runs once a year bringing live music and music-making to a group of schools, including SEND settings, across Gloucestershire. In short, between the 7th and the 20th of June 2022, I had the pleasure of visiting seven schools and working with over 350 school children in a crazy whirlwind of rhythm, beat, creativity and most importantly an enjoyment and love of music.
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n our second look at cultural education this month we profile the work of Will Crawford, guitarist, music educator, and founder of the ‘mindfulness through music’ wellbeing company, quietnote. Will works with a multitude of communities across the UK and here he discusses his work with the Cheltenham Music Festival on their ‘Musicate Programme’.
Through my workshop I had three main goals: firstly, allow the children to experience, engage, and enjoy live music making; secondly, embody the concepts of beat and rhythm in an enjoyable and educational method; and finally, give them the opportunity to express creativity through musical creation and performance. Each session would open with an energising warm up, classical music can sometimes be seen as a static art form – images of musicians sat in small practise rooms for hours at a time may come to mind but, as I would shout to the students on a Monday morning: “in order to let the creativity grow first you have to let the energy flow.” This was followed by a series of simple to grasp yet highly informative musical games –
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passing a clap round a circle, clapping in time to a piece of music, clapping rhythms back and forth. Games like this should never be underestimated in terms of how wide spread a skill set they cover, the simple act of clapping back a rhythm improves ‘non-musical’ skills such as listening, memory, and confidence. One activity I would use with each group would be stomping in a circle in time to a beat, this was the perfect way to allow the children to really develop a strong embodiment of what a beat is - a concept children often understand but cannot articulate, as one child remarked to me: “it’s easy to feel but difficult to explain.”
The main exercise was, in a sense, a form of improvisation and composition. I would invite the class to find themselves in groups of two or three. Firstly, they were invited to stomp a beat at a consistent pulse. Once their beat was established, I invited them to create different rhythms in time to this beat. Starting simple by clapping on each beat and then inviting them to explore more complex patterns. Once they improvised more and more patterns, I asked them to formalise their ideas into a set piece – giving them total creative control except for one rule: ‘keep the beat going in your feet, and the rhythm going in your hands.’ Across the two weeks I had a huge array of performances, ideas, and dedication. Some students would take the ‘marching in time’ idea from earlier in the session and bring that into their composition, marching around and clapping a variety of rhythms. Others would find
December 2022
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