Rachel’s Blog

I’m just home from a residential care home, having led a short ‘taster’ session. It was seriously challenging as well as being enjoyable too.

It is a fairly large residential care home, with a fantastic ethos – the activities co-ordinator frequently takes some of the residents to the pub! As with larger numbers of people, there is bound to be a greater diversity of people in terms of their abilities/limitations. Having previously met some of the residents, I wasn’t quite prepared (in terms of variety of songs/resources) to cater for the different levels that I found there. Although the session went reasonably smoothly, and part of the reason for this taster session was to gauge people’s needs, I was disappointed that I had not been able to engage with every person, and draw them into what I hoped to be an enjoyable and uplifting musical experience.

Having said this, many participants did enjoy themselves. Some were singing along and using percussion instruments to beat (or shake) in time. I think a small change of mixing up the people of different abilities would help enormously, as it would enable the less able people to feel more involved.

Key Learning:

• Take in more material than you plan to use, including songs of varying complexity, from the very simple, to the more difficult.
• Develop songs or activities to assess people’s different levels.
• Underline the importance of a tailored music session and emphasise the point of a taster session
• Don’t be afraid to ask staff for small changes in the set-up. They want the sessions to be positive, as much as you do.
• Enjoy it! Even if you feel like you are struggling, keep going, keep being enthusiastic, don’t give up.

A couple of weeks ago I ran a session which went really well. Looking back on the session plan – which is happily written in purple felt-tip – I could see why:

• I thought very carefully about each song
• I experimented with soundscapes, and vocal sounds, not just on songs and song-words
• Many of the songs used very simple guitar chords so I could concentrate more on interacting with the participants
• We varied dynamics, speeds – almost resulting in seasickness during What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?
• I introduced simple descants over well-known songs
• Participants were encouraged to think of their own words for verses

All of these things, as well as other elements relating directly to the singing and the use of percussion instruments, I feel helped the participants feel more confident about their musicality and the range of sounds they can produce. So, why can’t they all be like this? As I gather new repertoire, inevitably, some of it might be a little shaky – it may take me some time to develop the activities around a song. The key is to keep things relatively simple and to rely on the range of emotions we can employ and convey with our voices.

It was good to see another hospital embracing singing as an aid to people’s health. I find it interesting that it is referred to as singing ‘therapy’. Yes it is therapeutic – but isn’t it simply singing?

I’ve been at the Substance office today in Manchester near the beginning of an exciting collaborative learning project, bringing together a variety of creative and cultural organisations in a partnership to share learning on leadership. Included in the core partnership are Substance, Greater Manchester Music Action Zone (GMMAZ), Music Leader North West, and Performing Arts Network and Development Agency (PANDA). My role within this project is to facilitate the online sharing, provided on a web-platform. I want to use this post to explore how I use technology, and its potential for freelance artists and arts organisations.

My experience of distance learning and online forums has been, most often, frustrating. People did not respond to each others’ posts, content was messy and badly presented/described, and in the case of distance learning, the obligatory contributions to online discussions were so forced as to hardly be worth writing. This is why I am really looking forward to getting started on the leadership Lab project, where I will be providing online facilitation. Just as a discussion is most often useful when effectively facilitated, so too online discussion needs to be guided, especially as online discussions will be at a slower pace, as new comments are added over days and weeks.

Blogging can be equally frustrating at times, especially when no one comments – how do I know anyone is reading it, or that it is worth writing? Blogging is definitely worth the effort as it is a wonderful method of documenting publicly any influences, ideas, learning, project development, anything, in a concrete, yet informal way. And as someone running a small business, it’s a cheap (free with WordPress) way of having a website which is more than just an online poster.

Twitter is another tool which I have found incredibly helpful, mainly because it has greatly improved my google rating (yes, I admit, in my vainer moments I occasionally Google myself). Twitter is also great for seeing content I may be interested in. I follow people I am likely to be interested in such as musicians, community arts organisations, my friends, people in my local area e.g. local hospital as I am interested in health issues, local journalists and some newspapers. Twitter etiquette means you can follow as many people as you like. The Twitter question is different from Facebook, which is more about status/state of mind etc, where as Twitter asks the question ‘What are you doing?’. This can be useful for businesses as it is less personal, you only have 140 characters, so a ‘tweet’ might be “at the Substance office in Manchester meeting the orgs involved in Leadership Lab with @timdavies”

All of these different technologies have required a fair investment of time to get set up – the blog being the most time-consuming, although quite straightforward, and Twitter being very easy indeed. They are definitely worth doing as once they have been set up, they are easy to update and show everyone what you are doing/thinking, which is where the conversations should start. Tim Davies has written a series of one-page guides to help people start up with these different web-tools.