Memorandum submitted by Dr Jonathan R Girling, West Midlands

 

1.0 Summary

 

The work Creative Partnerships spearheads is invaluable to the future of education in this country. The shift in focus away from measured attainment towards enjoyment of learning while exploring individuals' creative potential engenders a raising of the aspirational bar, essential in building skills and confidence in each and every person.

 

2.0 Background

 

I have worked in education since 1994, lecturing in Music (BA, BMus, BEd, MA and MMus) for seven years in two university faculties, including Birmingham Conservatoire. Since 1997, I have been regularly commissioned to write music for groups such as the BBC Singers, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and by classical virtuosos such as the percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie. In 1998 I won a Royal Television Society Award with the team working on Channel 4's Equinox: Losing It.

 

2.1 Furthermore, I have led education projects with young people for thirteen years, working with the CBSO, Ensemble Bash, the Society for Promotion of New Music, Kokuma African Dance Company, the Brodsky Quartet and other groups across the country, as well as working with local youth clubs on a voluntary basis.

 

3.0 Factual Information

 

In October 2005 I started working with Creative Partnerships for the first time. The project's aims were to explore pupils' creativity, to be 'risky', to have no set goal, and to respond at every turn to student needs or suggestions. In this first meeting with Creative Partnerships Birmingham, with the Chief Executive and Education Manager of the CBSO, my blood ran cold. A project with no specific aims or objectives, to be risky, and to be pupil-led - 'utter disaster' were the words which sprung to mind! However, by October 2006, we had five schools with around 50 pieces of music, mostly written down in 'score-form', being performed at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, full of 2000 of their school mates cheering them on, BBC Radio 3 recording the performance for their Listen Up! festival, local TV coverage, and fifteen pupils playing alongside the orchestra in the premiere of my new CBSO commission Grimm Tales: The Water Nixie.

 

3.1 The conditions agreed for the Grimm Tales project was to work in partnership with five schools in a 'CP Cluster' in Birmingham, comprising a challenging secondary school (Castle Vale), two main-stream primary schools in the same area (Paget and Heathlands) and two special schools (Wilson Stuart Secondary and Beaufort Primary). In collaboration with CBSO Education, two players would go into each school for six sessions spanning the summer and autumn terms of 2006, accompanied by myself. The umbrella project title, Grimm Tales, described the textural foundation for the project, with sixteen tales selected from the Brothers' Grimm collections. These I edited and published for each school, with the lead-teacher and students choosing tales to base their work on for the Spring Term of 2006. Stories were then either re-written (modernised and changed), or provided the spring-board for new tales - the first stage of 'creativity' - alongside art-work, masks, sets, or anything else that inspired the students - the second stage of creativity. One or two stories were then chosen (normally by the students) to base the musical part of the project around - the third creative stage.

 

3.2 In the Summer Term, the CBSO visits began. The challenges were hugely varied depending on the school. For example, Castle Vale's challenges centred around a lack of teacher to lead the project and a whole range of discipline issues with their students; Beaufort's much younger students were profoundly physically (and mentally) impaired meaning that entirely different criteria to 'measure' creativity (or at least the progress of our project) in their pupils was required. Here, simply being able to all start and stop sounds together as an ensemble within the structure of an improvised piece was a major achievement for all concerned. Yet the excitement, joy and sheer pleasure each student derived from such a musical activity was evident and lasting from week to week, inspiring them to paint, move to the music, be magnetically drawn to the instruments, and produce music to the Fisherman and His Wife tale which they remembered even over an entire summer break.

 

3.3 However, the same ethos remained for each one of the schools involved - the fact that musical creativity could 'raise the bar' with levels of achievement for each student, and provide inspiration to go on and meet the challenges posed by the project. These were various and included finishing individual scores, then re-working them with time and new material, working with professional musicians, experimenting with signs and symbols (the written language of music), experimenting with sounds as well as tunes and rhythm (the aural language of music), responding to the story and characters therein, working to deadlines, working in teams of 2, 3, or 4, or in occasional class-wide pieces (sung, performed with instruments, or even movement machines with the CBSO accompanying them), exercising discipline in thought and action, sticking to the task, and eventually performing on a major concert platform in front of two thousand of their contemporaries.

 

3.4 The main difference with this project compared to many others I've been involved with was the level of creative responsibility given to each student. Many 'creative' projects involve an animateur using learned, existing musical language (a Samba rhythm or musical elements from Britten's Sea Interludes for example) to build up suites of music to perform to the school or parents at a concert or sharing day. Other projects I've seen involve skilled animateurs strongly directing group improvisation with each pupil invariably given a tiny cell of rhythm or melody, repeated and layered with other similar musical cells. Creative Partnerships, with the CBSO, did not desire this. They required us (and the students) instead to take risks in our creativity. Consequently, inspired by musical games and exercises we did at first, each student (alone or in pairs) produced individual scores of sound, starting with basic dots (single, short notes) and longer-lines (long notes) to represent sounds. They then developed, with my help, a score system individual to them - dots and dashes were placed around fixed horizontal lines for 'high' and 'low'; certain signs meant 'loud' or 'soft'; rapidly played; randomly or fixed; repeated or played once; sliding up and down; plucked or with a bow; accents hard and soft; etc.. Some of these signs came entirely from them, and as they worked with the CBSO musicians in their school, they found what worked, what needed refining, what needed clarifying, what sounded good, and what sequence of sounds needed developing. If they were musically trained, traditional notation (like tunes!) was encouraged to be placed alongside less traditional notation. Students with performing abilities were given the chance to play their pieces with or without the CBSO instead of simply writing a 'commission' for the players. Keyboards were, on the whole, banned, and live music was encouraged, including voice - any sounds can be useful, and electronic composition is very important, but experimentation with live sound is essential at their stage of learning, particularly with the facility of a 'live sound box' in the form of the CBSO musicians.

 

3.5 In short, within class improvisatory projects in general, individual creativity is never truly explored - everything is done en masse. The Grimm Tales project, however, was quite different, as each student had to realise the consequences of their own decisions on a structural and microscopic scale. If the student was ill-disciplined and uncommitted, it was immediately apparent, and quite a shock for them when their music was played at the sharing session at the end of each lesson. But this was rare: one teacher remarked to me that over the course of the project, it was the first time she had seen every student in her 'very difficult class' turn up for every single session, be motivated and excited about the music they were composing, and inspired by the work they were undertaking. This pride in their own work was tangible and, in turn, highly motivating for us as a team working on the project.

 

3.6 It must also be noted that having the skill and professionalism of players like the CBSO to try out ideas and interpret the children's symbols and signs rendered the need to use large improvisatory groups defunct. This, for me, is the way to go in creative music projects - working as a team, similarly to how rock groups work, how producers work with artistes, directors work with actors, lighting, script-writers and composers, how so many creative-practitioners work collaborating with each other. It encourages and develops the skills of each student without it becoming the limiting (or debilitating) factor in their individual creativity. As a composer, I write music for ensembles or instrumentalists that I would find impossible to play personally - and this inspired me to develop this way of working with students in schools, something that seemed to resonate with Creative Partnerships own aims and objectives for learning and education.

 

3.7 It is impossible to quantify the effect such a CBSO/CP project like Grimm Tales will have had on so many young lives situated in some of the most deprived communities in Birmingham. We can certainly say that many of the children developed confidence in their own ability to create a work from conception to completion, learning important skills in writing for professionals, working together, making tough decisions and seeing them through, and creating work they could not possibly imagine producing at the start of the project. The smiles on their faces when they received roars of approval from their contemporaries in the audience on the day of the performance was a sight to behold. Furthermore, the chance for fifteen young people to actually play chimes, bells and swirrbogen alongside one of the best orchestras in the world, as part of the premiere of The Water Nixie, could only help to inspire them to look beyond their immediate surroundings to the myriad of possibilities the world has to offer. Quoting from a paper's review of the concert, they themselves were the 'glittering surround-sound counterpoint' placed at various points and levels around Symphony Hall, behind the stage and permeating the audience. They had in turn inspired and shaped my creative work for the CBSO, and then finally became an integral feature in it: creativity works two ways. Those 'imaginative muscles' which I started to develop while at my school over twenty years ago, amazed and overcome by music I started to listen to then, the working-class son of a shopkeeper from the dock-end of Felixstowe - this music I absorbed, and the music that started to grow in my head and heart inspired me to imagine a world outside the drudgery and greyness of my home town. I believe that, in the same way, projects like Grimm Tales give children hope outside their present circumstances to look beyond what they can see - hope found in creativity, invaluable experience interacting with professionals, stimulating learning, developing new approaches to problem solving, helping students rise to the challenges of new worlds and way of thinking and working, while aiding and inspiring teachers in the difficult jobs they have to do every day.

 

4.0 Recommendations

 

The job that Creative Partnerships is doing is immense and profound, and I hope it becomes increasingly greater in scope. We need to move learning away from remembering facts and figures, to problem solving and creativity that is required in every level of the professional world. Ideas are not enough. Commitment and a pursuance of an idea to its completion, backing this up with time, research, experimentation and capital is essential. Taking risks is scary but can be deeply rewarding, and can change the world we live in. This is to be encouraged at every level of school and university education. It doesn't have to be reckless, if accompanied by a parallel or integrated programme of learning and support to develop and maintain essential skills. The Grimm Tales project was some of the most exciting and challenging work I've been involved with, and I would not hesitate to work with Creative Partnerships again.

 

 

July 2007