Last night I attended an astonishing event in Haddington’s Corn Exchange organised by Mike Cullen and a host of talented and generous friends in aid of the victims of Haiti’s earthquake. I’m sure Mike won’t mind my mentioning here that the amount raised is already over £5,000 and rising. Perhaps Mike could let us know the final figure and the names of all those involved in putting on such an excellent night.
The Corn Exchange was transformed into a TOTP studio:
The quality of the bands was outstanding - including State Freed, featuring some Knox lads:
The audience were invited to dress up and many really pushed the boat out. I was keen to do my bit with this barely noticeable tweak to standard school dress code:
All 500 tickets were sold and the atmosphere was fantastic. I found this quite a moving event - not least because I had the chance to catch up with some old friends - including school friends. The dynamic between music, geography and emotion is a strange one. I lived in Haddington until I moved away to study in 1979 - quite a while ago. Yet last night, I’d never felt more part of, nor proud of, the place.
Well done to everyone involved!
I note that film director, David Lynch, hopes to introduce Transcendental Meditation (TM) to UK schools - details here in Guardian and Telegraph. His belief (described more fully in his own words here) is that it would help attention and behavioural problems. This seems believable. Whether boisterous adolescents would warm to the idea is another question.
TM* is not the style with which I’m most familiar, nor the one I came to know through a course laid on by East Lothian Council’s Healthy Working Lives** team, last term. Those with little experience of meditation tend to focus primarily on the mental/psychological benefits. However, the physiological benefits should not be overlooked and such a perception may move the activity from the possibly presupposed subject area of RME into PE.
With well-being joining literacy and numeracy atop CfE’s global aims, inclusion of some kind of meditation should be, at least, considered.
* one further problem could be one of the apparent unfairness of subscribing and paying into a worldwide foundation/corporation - perhaps a less affiliated style would be preferable.
** while searching for links, I stumbled upon the fact that East Lothian’s Housing Department won a silver award for Healthy Working Lives. Perhaps they could let us in on their secret?
On Friday 29 Jan a group of 7 North Berwick High School guitar pupils gave, along with Zoe (singer), a performance of two songs at the PTA Burns Supper. While the performances were very good, and very well received, the recordings were not great - it was a live event, after all. So today, we met in the cathedral-like acoustic of the Dance Studio to make studio recordings.
The final mix was luck - the placing of a Zoom H2 in the middle of the studio and distancing people by intuition more than science. I hope you’ll agree that the result and, more particularly, the performance of the pupils is a success. Thanks to the PE Dept. for their hospitality. It’s worth remembering that these recordings came at the end of a school day, which had already featured a lunchtime rehearsal (of other material) and that the pupils went straight to record without further run-through. It may be my imagination, but I sense a difference in feel between live and studio events for pupils: the former is all about energy, communication and the moment, while the latter is more about focus, attention to detail and posterity.
The Lea Rig: the-lea-rig-2010-02-09
The Deil’s Awa Wi’ The Exciseman:the-deils-awa-wi-the-exciseman
I first came across the idea of mirror neurons in February 2001. How do I know this with such certainty? Because I wrote to New Scientist about the article concerned. The notion has featured recently as several pupils are playing pieces with a moto perpetuo right hand pattern. Here are three examples of such pieces currently being studied by pupils:
Ana Vidovic playing Etude No. 1 by Heitor Villa Lobos:
Ben Kearsely playing West Coast* by Helen Sanderson:
Peo Kindgren playing Estudio No. 6 by Leo Brouwer:
The essential thing in learning such pieces is to master the right hand pattern, by playing it without any distractions from the left hand. The hope in so doing is that the pattern will soon run on auto-pilot. That way, pupils will not be distracted when the left hand re-enters**. As such patterns are soon memorised, pupils are free to look away from the music and I ask them to look at my right hand while they continue to play the pattern. It may be my imagination but, almost without exception, pupils seem to relax the hand and play in a more economical way than might normally be the case. Could mirror neurons be at work here?
* I would describe this piece as the single most successful teaching piece I know
** An interesting half-way stage between playing without left hand and including the left hand is to introduce an unchanging chord shape which descends one fret-at-a-time. This way the hands can begin to come together in a way which falls somewhere between having no left hand involvement and having very varied (and therefore distracting) left hand content. A diminished 7th chord shape serves this purpose very well and, in fact features in the Villa Lobos Etude(from 0:41 to 1:17 on the Ana Vidovic video above)
I should also point out that some doubt has been cast on the theory of mirror neurons.
Further links on the topic of mirror neurons:
Wikipedia article
V. S Ramachandran
And here are two short videos on the topic:
And more generally - Sergio della Sala on neuroscience and learning about learning.
Setting dates for Showcase rehearsals always seems straightforward at the beginning of the session. Refreshed from seven weeks holidays, the biological reality of, say, a Friday afternoon rehearsal at the end of the week after the October break, when the clocks have recently gone back … cannot readily be conjured up. The day duly arrived – a few excuses had been made, one bus was late and I readied myself to embrace a rehearsal where, if we distributed the new music, mastered a few bars and managed to stay in a good mood and avoided frightening the new, younger pupils, it could be considered a success. To my amazement, the ensemble pretty much knocked this off in one go:
The moral of the story: never prematurely pre-install pessimism on behalf of others. Thanks, everyone!
Julian Treasure, of The Sound Agency, discusses how sound effects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively and behaviourally in this short video. The stress-inducing bell/buzzer at 0:44 is neither as loud nor as long as one of the bells in my working week – affecting hormones (cortisol), heart rate and brain waves. His recommendation is five minutes (or more) of birdsong per day.
I’ve just been catching up with Alistair McGowan on Radio 4’s Chain Reaction. Aside from the expected entertainment value, he struck me as being someone of great insight. This came through particularly in his descriptions of trying to get into the what makes characters tick. From a technical point of view though, what really struck me was his description of what we warm to in a voice. It could be summed up as:
This made me wonder about voice projection in our profession. The subject has come up in terms of voice preservation and avoidance of unnecessary injury but not, to the best of my knowledge, in terms of putting pupils at their ease. Moreover, I can’t help feeling that, perhaps, a little more knowledge of the workings of the primordial instrument might give us one more tool in our armoury in understanding physical manifestations of psychological features in pupils.
The above Chain Reaction link will take you to listen again until 18:30 tomorrow (Wednesday 7th Oct.) when, speaking of resonance as we were, Alistair McGowan interviews the cathedralesque Simon Callow.
You can also see Alistair McGowan describe some of his working method and observations here:
As the last few moments of summer freedom trickle through the hands of thousands of pupils and teachers up and down the land, might these few thoughts offer some perspective?
Radio 4 is broadcasting a series of five short programmes this week (Mon – Fri, 15:45 – 16:00) about guitar style and technique. Each day, Joan Armatrading discusses playing ideas, tunings etc. with one of five players: Mark Knopfler, Bonnie Raitt, John Williams, Russel Lissack and Bert Jansch.
Wednesday’s edition of All In The Mind featured a study on the effect of rudeness (in the workplace) on creativity and productivity. The study by Amir Erez of the University of Florida and Christine Porath of the University of Southern California, discovered that even witnessing rudeness can affect cognitive performance, memory and incliantion to help out.
This discovery is at odds with our culture of humiliation as seen in Britain’s Got Talent; X Factor; The Weakest Link; Dragons’ Den; The Apprentice. The first two of these are extremely popular with pupils and, before hearing of this study, I often used to wonder what message was being conveyed when the response to ambition was often mere cruelty.
Listen again here, or else! The article is the second of three in the programme.
