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welcome to Heart Beats

welcome to Heart Beats

Monday 20 March 2017

'a different outlook on improvising and listening to one another.....'

On Saturday we ran a training day - music leadership skills development. It was inspiring and fun to spend the day with a group of talented young musicians, who have an interest in community music and music therapy.

Days like this are rare enough -  and short, too - so we needed to get straight to the point. We wanted to talk, share, play, and explore concepts.


Being given the opportunity to share what you do begins with plenty of thinking. The idea was to explain what we do in our sessions, and why, and put some context on it all. We needed to cover all areas of interest, through doing as well as telling.

Between us we covered a lot of ground, from information on how the brain is affected by music, to receptive and expressive communication, to what happens to your listening ability when you only play for 50% of the time in an improvisation.


We asked everyone what they thought of the day - was it useful? Some comments...
- inspirational, invigorating, eye opening, educational
- very grounding, so much de-stressing - so warm and friendly
- a different outlook on improvising and listening to one another
- meditative, insightful, really fun
- cemented my want to be involved in community music and music therapy
- JOYOUS! - expressive, relaxed, informative, and personal in the sense that I felt as if I and other members of the group were expressing personal things through spontaneous music making
- I hope we can have future sessions like this!



We're already planning how we can offer more sessions like this. Thanks for coming, everybody.


Friday 17 March 2017

Integration, inclusion - powerful music

What a brilliant session today in Bridgwater - with students from the Jean Rees Centre and Chilton Trinity school coming together to improvise, co-create, and listen.

We can say this was an 'inclusive' session because there was a role for everyone, with open permission to play, listen and be creative. The atmosphere was respectful, playful, and trusting. No one was excluded.

We can also say it was an 'integrated' session because everyone there was bringing different skills to the room. J from Jean Rees taught the Chilton Trinity students some Makaton which they then incorporated in to some conducting. Everyone worked together to craft and perform small pieces of new music.

Some leadership skills emerging

We are running these sessions to explore what happens when you bring peer groups together from different settings, and to see how communication develops with music as the medium.

Well! today certainly had a big warm glow, and the room was full of life affirming sound.

Thursday 16 March 2017

Sharing what we do

Doing our final planning for our music leaders development day this Saturday, we are reflecting on what we do and how we do it - and of course, why we do it.
The trick is to share that usefully with other people so that they will be inspired by it all.

We like running training sessions. It's worth acknowledging that our main funders, Youth Music, support and encourage CPD within projects.
It helps define what we do as a team, and what is unique about our approach.

There's a lot of interest in musical inclusion at present. Between us we've been working in this area for plenty of years. The privilege of wide experience gives us something worthwhile to add to the conversation.
some serious listening!

Here's some feedback from our last open training day

- fundamental, free, expressive, understandable
- what a great combination of theory and practice!
- amazing - I learned a lot. I learned, what is music.
- life affirming. It opened my eyes to a different type of work
- inspiring, motivational, therapeutic

If you would like us to come to you, in whatever setting, and deliver some training, do get in touch.


Friday 3 March 2017

THE GIANT JAM

 We are so pleased and excited to be launching The Giant Jam - a one-day festival celebrating musical creativity within the local learning disability community.

All our team are delighted to have been awarded funding from the Big Lottery Fund to celebrate the achievement of our young musicians , trainees, volunteers and wider community that have been drawn together by the AllStars project.

The party planners


The Giant Jam will host an amazing variety of musical performances, jamming and workshops, dancing and discos, rest and relaxation and of course plenty of tasty food.

This party will be taking place at the Ammerdown Centre, near Radstock on Sunday 2nd July 2017 from 12pm to 8pm.

Tickets are FREE, and are available at The Giant Jam Eventbrite page.


Keep an eye on the blog for more news, and follow our facebook page