How to end - part one : the Giant Jam

How to end AllStars music? Starting in the spring of 2015, the delivery phase has ended now - we will spend the next months reflecting, planning and evaluating - taking a breath before new things roll out.

Even in the early planning phase of AllStars we knew we'd want to mark the end of the work well.
Finishing can be difficult; it's one of the recurring themes of funded work. We knew we wanted to say goodbye with optimism and a sense of achievement.

We planned an end-of-project festival. With additional financial support from the Big Lottery and their perfectly-timed 'Celebrate' fund, we were able to put on an event that brought our community of young and SEN/D musicians together.

Beautifully put together by Ben, our pastoral support worker, and Jade, our admin star, the Giant Jam festival was organised in consultation with a team of party planners from the Heart Beats group.

Frome Street Bandits

Art Box bunting

The Gaint Jam was held at the Ammerdown Conference Centre - a beautiful garden alive with flowers and bees.
The sun shone all day.

Bands played outdoors and in the 'main stage room',  a transformed space with underwater decor borrowed from a local festival organiser and excellent sound equipment provided by our project partners SRYP.

The main stage room

A dance workshop, Loops disco and four live bands made it a real festival.
Festival goers enjoyed a performance from an inclusive choir, a ukelele workshop, a drum circle,  an art workshop, free massage, interactive storytelling from Openstorytellers,

Smiling gate crew

Relaxing massage

Live music workshops

outdoor games, wood fired pizzas, and an array of treats supplied by the brand new catering van from Critchill SEN school.

An outdoor improvisation workshop showcased the talents of the Heart Beats group and involved lots of new people too.

An amazing team of stewards and volunteers  made the day safe, fun and accessible for everyone.

Stewards and volunteers

We even got a slot on BBC Points West.

The Giant Jam brought all sorts of people together - it was inter-generational, inclusive and really enjoyable.

We're glad that the AllStars project, which has united so many diverse musicians, could end on such a bright note and a beautiful day.

Workshop and Performance at Three Ways School.

Scott, John and Naomi are music students from Bath Spa University who've been on placements with the Heart Beats group this year. It's been fun working with them!

When Three Ways , a local SEN school, asked us to come in and do some music, we were thrilled when Scott and Naomi said they could join us...mostly because it was a real-life work experience opportunity for them, but also because they are top class musicians and have so many great ideas. Here's a clip of our planning session.

 

Last week we went to the school and ran workshops with two groups of post-16 and secondary students, improvising and creating new pieces of music together. Naomi and Scott added harp, saxophone, percussion and vocals, scaffolding the music and making sure everyone was engaged in a truly musical way.

The following morning the two groups performed in assembly to a relaxed and attentive audience.

The pupils enjoyed this experience as much as we did. 'I liked it because I haven't done anything like it before. It was fun to work with professional musicians. I was happy today in assembly. I'd like to try a different instrument next time, maybe a stringed one.'
'I've never played the steel pan before, it's my favourite instrument at the moment.' 
'The people let me have a go myself and be independent.'
'It was really good and interesting. I liked using the iPad because it avoided handache. I liked trying different instruments.'

A member of staff said : 'it was lovely to be able to see all the kid's faces in the group, they just looked so engaged and proud of themselves.'
The music co-ordinator said 'It was a fantastic thing to do, and covered so many aims that we've had for Music this year. 

 

Giant Jam news updates

Lots of good news about our festival The Giant Jam.

Ben is busy booking people to come and help make it happen.  Drum It Up drum circle, Frome Street Bandits, Openstorytellers, Bianco Rosso Pizzas, Loops disco - and loads more to be announced really soon.

Follow the news on facebook. Book free tickets on Eventbrite.

The Giant Jam is a celebration to mark the end of the AllStars project, which has included HeartBeats music club and much more besides. Help us to make it a day to remember. Tell your friends and 'spread the Jam!'

A Music Making conference

On Friday April 28th we'll be showing what we do at Youth + Music =  a Music Making Conference - a conference for teachers, youth workers, musicians, and music practitioners in Bridgwater.

Youth + Music = is organised by local organisation the Somerset Rural Youth Project, who have been project partners of ours for several years now.

Here's Geoff doing some music leading at their conference last year . This year we shall be explaining what we do to make our music workshops more inclusive.

'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.

Music leaders' development day - an opportunity

The AllStars team are running a FREE music leader's development day in Wells on March 18th.

This is for anyone with an interest in music leading and community music - come and learn some new ideas in a fun environment, and try some stuff out. The activities will be led by Russ Stanley, Alex Lupo and Jane Harwood.

We'll be sharing tips and ideas for good music leading, especially with groups with additional needs.You can do some leading, take notes, film, or just join in and play.


Bring a packed lunch and an instrument or your voice.

Venue : the Denning Room, Union St, Wells BA5 2PU
Date; March 18th
Time : 10.30 - 2.00

You'll need to book a place : email info@heartbeats.org.uk

Music tonight!

Hello - if you are in the Heart Beats crew - come along to Cedars Hall tonight to get our exciting programme for 2017 going with some real live music....

 

Everyone can expect a warm welcome, new faces and old : and we have some exciting news for you too.

Heart Beats starts tonight!

A reminder that the autumn sessions start tonight.
This will be our last session at the Lawrence Centre before moving on to Cedars' Hall.

Tonight we'll be using our voices, and rhythms, to greet each other and make patterns of sound.
Theme of the evening is 'everybody jam' - chosen by Geoffrey.

See you there!

September sessions, coming soon

It's been a lovely summer, but we can't wait to get together again for our autumn sessions, which start on September 22nd at the Lawrence Centre.
If you know anyone new who would like to come, ask them to contact us at info@heartbeats.org.uk

Hope to see you there!

Avalon School

Look! we've just found a page on Avalon Schools website, with photos of our visit there last February. What a great day that was... see their report here:
HeartBeats at Avalon

Wells Music Circus

This Saturday we'll be in Wells for the enormous, ambitious Music Circus. The city will be full of live music.

Please join us if you can - there will be some empty chairs and some spare instruments.

We'll be outside the Music School on the Cathedral Green, next to the Museum. Our slots are 11.15 - 11.30, and 12.10 to 12.25.

At 12.30 everyone involved will be singing 'All you need is Love' together, and then we're all having a picnic together on the Cathedral Green.

We'll have plenty of lovely instruments with us for you to play.

How do we know what we do is good enough?

It's not unusual to come away from a session feeling significantly better than when you first entered the building - but how do we actually capture that feeling? Those moments?

Evaluating our work is something that is a constant, ongoing process.
We observe, film, photograph, check that we're on track with aims and anticipated outcomes.

Sometimes it's easy, especially when you know people, to see change or capture 'those moments'.
When you're out and about working with new people, the challenges are more complex.

Recently we ran an outreach workshop with 32 students at a local residential college.
We felt it had been a good day, and we asked staff to give us some feedback.

Staff gave us top marks for meeting needs and getting the groups to work together.
What we did was 'age appropriate' ; 'engaging'; and 'easy to follow'.

The sessions were good!  We had everyone playing :
 'It was amazing to see two students who are normally noise sensitive smiling and really enjoying the session'

It was  'Excellent and brought something out in students that would not normally join in'

and, generally ' I loved it on a personal level and the students really enjoyed it – Thank you it was really fantastic.'
 ' Brilliant!'

Russ and Ben in the mood for a tune or two

Some quick tuning up before sessions

All good then.

The SRYP conference

Last Saturday, we went to the SRYP conference in Bridgwater.
Here's Geoff, Emma, Josh and Katie, with Russ and Michael Eavis. Michael joined in with our warm ups though he wasn't to keen to play the drum that was offered him!

The HeartBeats team

Our instruments looked lovely in the new theatre

SRYP conference

Somerset Rural Youth Projects' Rural Music Network have been a partner project for us in HeartBeats and the AllStars work.
We've shared expertise, done a lot of co-management support, and run workshops for each other.
Last month, James from SRYP came and ran a drum kit workshop for us. Different ... fun.

This weekend, Katie, Emma, Josh and Geoff are co-delivering two music inclusion workshops at SRYP's conference in Bridgwater. Jane Russ and Rachel will be there supporting.
We're looking forward to meeting other music leaders, new people, and - of course - Michael Eavis too.

Partnership working

AllStars and the Heart Beats Music sessions are funded by Youth Music. We are a 'fund B" initiative, which means we are running several projects at the same time, that all fit together.

Our big aim is to bring all sorts of young musicians together (trained or not)  to experiment with sound and explore their love of music : all the music we play is original, new, and improvised - the shared product of a group of people.
Our core team and some volunteers have a range of learning disabilities and we believe, if things are right for them, then they're right for all of us.

To help us run our project, we have some partner organisations.
These are : Wells Cathedral School; Spaeda; Elmwood and Penrose Schools Federation in Bridgwater; and the Somerset Rural Youth Project (SRYP).

All of these partners are valuable to our work - they provide information, support, networks, help with recruitment, venues - and workshops too.

Tonight James Brookes from SRYP is bringing a team from his Rural Music Network, along with several drum kits, to lead a rhythm workshop.
They've been running kit sessions in Shepton Mallet and Castle Cary, and want to share what they do.

We're looking forward to this - a different way to play ourselves into the Easter break.
Last time James came to work with us it was awesome....  everyone enjoys to try something entirely new, and meet new people.
Let's hope there will be enough mini eggs to go round.

Wells Musicircus

In June, we're taking part in Wells Musicircus, which is being co-ordinated by our project partners Wells Cathedral School.

Inspired by the composer John Cage, musicians will perform simultaneously from every available space, creating a joyous musical marketplace.

This will be the largest gathering of musicians Wells has ever seen, flooding the city with a cacophony of sound...

The event begins in the market place and wends its way across the Cathedral Green, to end in a huge picnic by the new Cedars Hall.

Our role in this? we'll be there playing music that will reflect the mood of the day and of course - we shall offer instruments and a chance to join in with our HeartBeats group.

Stay Up Late

Just wanted to give a shout out to the Stay Up Late folk....

Stay Up Late is a charity started by members of the punk band, 'Heavy Load'. Frustrated at seeing people with learning disabilities leaving gigs at 9pm due to their support staff working inflexible shift patterns they decided to do something about it. Stay Up Late exists to promote full and active social lives for people with learning disabilities.
Stay Up Late is about having choice and freedom in your life to do what you want to do.
Fight for the right to party!
www.stayuplate.org
There's a facebook page too

We were thinking about Stay Up Late because it's such an important thing that people can have a life after tea time.

One young musician in our group is able to come along to the Heart Beats group because someone who works with him (well, actually his piano tutor) was inspired by the Stay Up Late campaign to just - get him in the car - and come and play some music. Simple, but powerful.

And we'd like to give a shout out to all the other drivers, parents, support staff, bus drivers and folk who go out of their way to bring people to our sessions. It's a rural area, and some journeys are long - that's why we'll always do our best to welcome everyone and make sure the kettle's on.

Funky Fairfield

They don't know it yet, but the students of Fairfield Farm College who come to our Heart Beats music session tonight are in for a bit of funk ... and they get to try out some brand new AllStars instruments that have just come out of the box....

This isn't our first visit to Fairfield, and we expect to be welcomed and make some great music.
We'll be back in the spring, because the college have invited us to run a music day for their arts week.

 

It's great for our team to get out and about and run some outreach sessions like this. Of course it's a challenge too, meeting new people and getting something good to happen in just two hours, but we have a whole host of ideas up our sleeves, and lots of different ways to include people.

Partnerships, meetings, Fast Forward Festival... a busy time

It's been a busy time recently - the last month has been full up.

We've been meeting our fabulous partners who are helping us to set up and deliver an excellent programme of music making. 

We've had meetings and hatched action plans with Wells Cathedral School, the Somerset Rural Youth Project, Elmwood and Penrose federation of schools in Bridgwater, and Spaeda in Langport.

We've run an arts week music day in Fiveways school, who loved our work and want us to come back and do more.

We've visited Fairfield Farm College in Wiltshire and fixed dates to do an evening session there, and an arts week day next year.

Alex and Jane have been planning out the Listening Lounge strand of the project, with a focus on mentoring and Arts Award - that's going to be exciting, a new departure for us. We're looking at creating a space where music therapy and community music can work together -  where we can listen sensitively and respond intentionally.

We attended the Fast Forward Festival 'Inclusive Excellence' conference at The Colston Hall in Bristol. This was a thought provoking day that ended in performances by Drake Music and the Paraorchestra.

We were asked to consider that 'The musical world discriminates against disabled people. If we don’t change this, we endorse it.
1. What must the music industry do to create a fair ecology?
2. How can music education change to prepare young disabled musicians for this new ecology?'
We went away with a head full of questions and ideas about access, ability, inclusion, and participation. We need more chance to meet and investigate these big issues together. It's  a vibrant discussion and there are so many angles.
AllStars offers an informal music education environment where our team do their best to provide a valuable, progressive experience for everyone, reacting to individual abilities and interests. We feel we can work with young people who wouldn't have been offered much in the way of formal musical education; we believe access to live music making is a universal right. Not sure if this is 'inclusive excellence', but it's always surprising and exciting, and goes further than we ever thought it would. One thing for sure, there's no discrimination here. Come and play music with us.

On Thursday Jane joined a conversation on SEN/D music education at the Wiltshire Music Centre. Again - lots of thought provoking questions were raised about music, excellence, and inclusion. One thing that emerged was that the AllStars project may be able to help with CPD and developing the workforce.

What we're looking forward to now is our next music session on July 16th. It's all very well talking about music, but you mustn't forget to play some now and again, too...
This seems to be a good time to say how good it is to be part of such a great team, in the SW, doing what we love best : making music!

Oh - and we mustn't forget Geoff: see you all on Thursday.

Taster sessions - next session is on July 16th

Hi everyone.
Our taster sessions are going really well, plenty of people coming, and lots of good music.

We have a short break now. There is no session this week.

The next two dates are :

JULY 16TH
JULY 30TH

The regular sessions begin on September 17th. If you can't make any of the tasters but want to sign up for the autumn, email us for more information : info@heartbeats.org.uk

We have a feeling .....it is going to be great project. AllStars are go! come and play music with us....