Thursday 20th November 2008

Boys aren't keen on singing. Apparently.
You wouldn't have guessed it from the speed with which the male half of Paul Jones' year 5 class, sprang to turn a solo rendition of their vocal piece into an ensemble performance by 18; not just singing but swaying together too.

We're preparing for a small end of term sharing at which we'll bring year 7s and year 5s to show each other what they've been working on. Today Bobbie led a session at Chivenor School in which the children combined four of the melodies that they created a couple of weeks ago. The melodies were created from the speech patterns of excerpts from interviews that the children had done with older people some weeks before. A really good session that we'll build on over the next couple of weeks before sharing it in mid December.

The late afternoon session at Astral Youth Centre built on work we'd done over the previous couple of weeks. In the last session both older and younger people collected sounds from around the building that can be used as sounds in beat construction. Today we used conversation about "Christmas" (very topical) and "Tomorrow" to produce words that can accompany those sounds as percussive elements. We also tried a random rhythm creation exercise in which everyone chose two beats on which they'd place one of the sounds we'd sampled. I'll be using a combination of these to create rhythm loops to go along with the one produced in Chris's session a couple of weeks ago.

Dave

Chivenor House, October 2nd.

After a couple of weeks delivering sessions at the primary school, our Thursday afternoon sessions moved back to their proper home at Chivenor House last week; I’d like to say I noticed the ceiling repairs but I didn’t. I spent the first half of the session leading the group, all together, counting up to eight; not as easy as it may sound. The exercise centred on each person picking their choice of beats one to eight, and either clapping, playing or speaking on that beat. Musically this ticks a lot of boxes for children; all participants have to be able to keep the pulse together, all the counting happens silently, and the beat that they choose has to be ‘hit’ with some precision.

We experimented with clapping, clicking fingers, playing percussion, and finally saying a single word. I asked them to think of one thing that they’d seen on their way to school, or on their way to the session. All of this worked well, although taking things to the next step, where we only spoke those words that fell on even or odd beats was a step too far, this time.

For the second half of the session I asked the children to interview the older people about a particular theme; in this case ‘food’. We’ll have a proper listen to the results when we get to the next editing session.