Wells Musicircus

The Wells Musicircus on June 18th was something quite different for us - an outdoors performance, in the company of more than 500 performers all ranged around the beautiful Cathedral Green, with an estimated audience of between 2500 - 3000 people!

Not only did we enjoy playing, and audience participation, but it was a chance to hear some other music too. A great day.

Martina on tongue drum, Sophie on vocals

Mark on the Big Pan

listening to the music

ready to go!

Tom, Martyn. Josh

Josh on the tubes

Tom and Russ setting up

Beautiful! cellos right next to us

Trust and participation

Trust is such an enormous part of our music work. 

The young people who come to play music with us need to trust us.
We need to create a safe space that makes everyone who enters it feel they can trust us to provide support, encouragement and diverse creative opportunities.
The act of improvised, lived music making itself cannot happen with trust.
As an organisation, we need to trust in each other to share an agreement on what is good, a general perspective, and how to work with whatever arises.

Recently we discussed the tensions that go into making a successful, user-led, creative environment.
Trust underpins all of this:

• ownership / shared identity
• joy / challenge
• flexibility / familiarity
• risk / safety
• shared experienced / personalised experience
•  communication / inspiration
• suspense / reassurance
• stimulation / rest

Trust enables participation.
Lawrence Becko, former Sound Connections Programme Manager, writes about Youth Participation in the arts:
'sometimes we simply forget to listen to what young people are saying, believing 'adults know best'...Ultimately, the extent to which youth participation, voice and leadership can be encouraged will depend on the abilities, commitment, resources and 'buy in' of each organization, their staff, and the young people themselves.'

As Wired4Music say,

'By  taking ownership over their musical participation, young people can

voice their opinions freely, achieve more and get the most out  of  a  project  that has  been  designed  specifically  to  suit  their  needs.  In return,  organisations  can gain  new perspective  and  understanding  of  the  young  people they’re working with, save  money  and resources by  creating projects  that  will  be  successful for  their  participants and  support  young  people  to  create  new  opportunities  for themselves and progress within their own musical journeys.'

Heart Beats Music on the Sound Connections website

We were pleased to hear from Sound Connections after they read our words about inclusion on the Youth Music blog.
We gave them some information on how we work towards youth participation, and now we're listed on the 'Rewired' section of their website.
Being off in the sticks here in muddy Somerset, it's always good to know you're moving in the right direction, and can have a voice in the national debates and research into inclusion and music.
We feel we work hard to get it right, and part of that is knowing and understanding what other people are doing right across the country, in rural and urban settings. We learn from other people and it's good to have platforms like the Youth Music Network to share our ideas.

New post on the Youth music network

Count Me In have just put up a new blogpost on the Youth music network.

It's some thoughts about 'participation' and how tricky that can be to get right sometimes... and how everyone comes to music for a different reason, and just maybe leaves with a different benefit too.

This piece was inspired by a paper by Francois Matarasso, you can read that here.
He says some great things about impact and involvement.