About In Harmony Lambeth

In Harmony Lambeth News

Project team

• Following an overwhelming response from enthusiastic candidates, outstanding teachers have been appointed and will take up their posts full-time in September. They are:
  
  • Daniel Davies (cello)
    
  • Kirsty Wilcockson (general musicianship)
    
• With Senior Teacher Gill Walshaw's guidance we are looking forward to the creation of a terrific team. As an interim arrangement, Kathy Hulme (LMS senior Vocal teacher) and Gil Sharp (former professional violinist and Colourstrings teacher) are giving us the benefit of their expertise.
• All are very talented musicians with an impressive array of skills, interests, and experience, and all have a particular empathy for the project.
  
• The team of teachers meets every week for training/planning sessions. So far we have attended a lecture on musical feeling with a fine string quartet at the Royal Institution and had an excellent 2-hour session on repertoire, games and sequenced learning (with particular emphasis on cross-curricular skills) from Sarah Carling, an Early Years music consultant. Cyrilla Rowsell and Daisy Vatalaro have provided sessions on Kodaly musicianship and Dalcroze, eurhythmics respectively, and Lambeth Councils Chief Education Psychologist has provided insights on children with special needs. The developer of the internationally successful Mini Tennis programme, Sandi Proctor gave valuable insights into motivation, talent identification, parental involvement, coaching training, supporting structures and much more. Forthcoming sessions include a visit to the MusicMindSpirit organisation for a seminar with Prof Paul Robertson and his wife, Chika.
• The interim management team is cracking on with the business of pushing the project along: Donna Pieters (on secondment from Amicus Horizon), an experienced arts development officer and community worker, with an intimate knowledge of the families on the estate, is Interim Project Manager, Zoe Bolton is a music graduate and freelance cellist and is taking care of the administration for In Harmony and also dealing with the instruments from the "No Strings Attached" instrument amnesty. Brendon Le Page is Interim Director, and will be continuing in this position until a full-time Director is appointed.
  

Music Making Activity

• 60 nursery children and 60 Year One children have started classes in St Stephens and Herbert Morrison Primary schools. Many of these children live on Lansdowne Green Estate, but children who do not attend these schools are able to take part in the programme by attending afterschool sessions on the estate. The children and parents have been very excited and the lessons have gone extremely well, even under the glare of a BBC camera crew, which is filming for a potential TV series about the programme. They are already being introduced to instruments, and when the violin was passed around the circle in one class, they treated it like a piece of gold and the expressions on their faces were priceless.
• They have all had the opportunity to sit in with the players of the London Philharmonic Orchestra during a rehearsal of "In the Hall of the Mountain King", and have heard a variety of live performances by string players in several different settings – duos, trios, quartets from their teachers and the LPO, a klezmer band, English folk settings (with Bellowhead). As time goes on, more weekly sessions will be added, up to five per week.
  
• We are running the programme as a string quartet/orchestral string section. Double basses have been ordered and will be added in time.
  
• We are experimenting with the 'hole in the heart' operation for half size violins to be strung as violas, to give them a better sound, and geared heads for easier tuning.
  
• Also we have hundreds of multicoloured 'doodle bows' and we’re expecting to soon see children walking around the estate with their doodle bows in the hands, practising their bow-holds.
  
• All the children have had several try-out sessions on each violin, viola and cello, and with guidance, have settled on the instrument they want to learn in September.
• We have engaged a software company to turn the musical teaching material into an animated, interactive online resource. This is for children and parents to use at home and in designated practice areas, and a local charity with experience in providing laptops for children and managed learning environments is conducting a feasibility study and fundraising, to provide families with access to online resources.
• The Early Years resources include chiffon scarves; large blue circles of material (ponds) which children can hold onto in a circle and play musical games - (including bouncing a frog puppet while singing in Turkish); the worlds’ largest scrunchie which can be held by up to 15 children in a circle, to help them feel pulse and movement; and more recently, a swarm of bees.

Launch Ceremony

• As a focus to this first period, all the Year One children sung and played at a launch ceremony on the Estate on June 24th. The project was officially launched by the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, who struck a chord with the children and the parents when he emphasised his close and happy local connections, if not through his experiences on the violin! VIP’s from Lambeth Council and the Children and Young People’s Service, Southbank Centre, and Amicus Horizon also attended and gave their support. A cello ensemble from Wyvil Primary School and the ‘In Harmony’ string quartet performed a wide variety of music. The children and families were royally entertained by folk band Bellowhead, who had them dancing in the aisles.
• The great data collection exercise has begun, with assessments of children’s musical skills, attitudes, intensification of focus groups through stratified random sampling, all matched up with hard statistical data supplied by the schools and their teachers.

Next Steps

• The summer holiday programme will take place in the community hall on the estate during the week of August 3-7, with a variety of musical and musically related fun activities for children aged 7-10.
• With the experience gained so far, carefully considered plans are now in place for a full-scale programme of 3-4 sessions per week from the beginning of the Autumn term, and it will be fascinating to see just how rapidly the children make musical progress, and develop the social, learning and organisational skills they need, and to see how the initial enthusiasm of the parents develops into active involvement.
• By all accounts the children are really enjoying the sessions, and are developing quickly as musicians. The schools leadership teams and the estate management are very supportive of the project, and the parents and families have demonstrated their support. These positive first steps mean that the programme has a firm foundation for success.