Reflections on GIObabies Workshop 2024

First and most importantly – even very young children bring musical knowledge, experiences, and preferences, and they can make choices towards these. Our aim in GIO is to recognize each child’s musicality and to accompany and extend this.

Over the last few years, we have ended up with a joyful jam for around 15 minutes at the end of the workshop – everyone taking part however they wish, with the musicians wandering around playing with small emerging groups.

Co-faciliation has become a very important process in GIObabies workshops. For example, we wanted to explicitly foreground improvised movement in this workshop and were lucky to have Brian and Henry with us to lead on this.

Each facilitator contributed in distinct ways:

Before the workshop started, Brian was moving and improvising with a mum he knew. They made bridges with their bodies for kids to go under.

Henry responded to a wee boy’s musical improvisation with gesture. The boy’s music became louder and then he incorporated movement. The gestures became bigger and more extravagant until Henry collapsed on the ground; both were in fits of laughter.

Raymond took his shoes off and sat on the floor—he became a ‘saxophone station’ for children to approach, where they could choose to come by and try the saxophone keys or duet with him

Jessica played in response to a dad whooshing their child through space, enhancing the imaginative play and storytelling in that family. Her instrument became another sonified space for families to visit and interact with.

These were all spontaneous and emergent decisions made by each GIO facilitator based on the priorities of the moment; connecting with every family in the room through creative communication. We sought to find and mediate a musical connection—through sounding objects (the instruments, the room, our bodies) and through gesture. For instance, a wee girl made very rhythmical movements, maintaining a consistent pulse, first clapping, and then moving her arms up and down, not missing a beat. This caught my eye as she entered the room and I resolved to have a duet with her which responded to this embodied musicality at some point in the workshop.

Co-facilitation and improvisation can accommodate flexible goals, new creative directions, the skills of individuals and the preferences of the children. This adaptability was evident in how we worked together,  leveraging complementary expertise to respond to the room’s dynamics and foster connections. Attunement happened very quickly with people we’d never met. Listening to movement and listening to the moment were key elements of how we interacted to the children and their families throughout the session. I’m reminded of Maggie Nicols’ words about improvisation providing a place where we could be ‘together in our own rhythms’, rather than rhythm acting as a cage.

The jam at the end was an opportunity for free expression, but also space for tunes—after a good 15/20 minutes, Raymond played Blue Monk. I joined in with him (thanks for the easy key for bass Raymond!) and used this to musically signal that we were moving toward a close in the session. This demonstrates the effect that co-facilitators can have on each other – extending ideas and combining the creative and pedagogical resources we all bring.

Finally, I could see the children had agency: conducting adults and each other, taking turns, realizing that gesture had communicative creative potential with musical consequences. Adults demonstrated listening in an expanded, multimodal way. We paid attention to how the children made noise, sung, gestured but also when they cooried in to their parents for a break. Everyone respected their choice to sit out for a bit and were ready to join them if and when they were ready to jump back in.  

Music, Inclusion and Creativity

 Music, Inclusion and Creativity blog 2

In this blog I’ll describe the contexts of my research and how inclusion was enacted by the music organisation I worked with.

Intro

For my British Academy postdoctoral fellowship, I wanted to work with children and young people who have Additional Support Needs, both in mainstream and special schools and examine relationships between music, creativity and wellbeing. All of these elements are complex and overlapping so I made a decision early on to work with an inclusive music organisation. This allowed me to observe what expert teams of practitioners did and use this to reflect on inclusion and what kinds of communication support this.

Language pertaining to additional support needs and disability is both changeable and context dependent. This makes consistent terminology challenging. In line with the participatory research orientation of my project, I always speak to my partners any time I write about the research. For Limelight practitioners, terminology was either ‘disabled practitioner’ or’ practitioner with disabilities’. These terms will be used interchangeably to reflect diversity of preference of these adults. Additional support needs (henceforth ASN) is used to refer to under-18s who may be workshop participants it is the preferred terminology in Scotland for school-aged children.

I have been privileged to work with Limelight Music on and off since 2018, first on the Music as Social Innovation project and then on my BA postdoc project. However, I first met Limelight’s founder members Gordon Dougal and Fletcher Mathers around 16 years ago. I had been booked to work as a double bassist on a musical theatre show at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. Fletcher had one of the leading roles and Gordon contributed some of the music. This is relevant perhaps to illustrate the integratedness of professional scenes of music performance, education and community music in a small country like Scotland. It also shows that Community Music practice can be informed by a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.

What is Inclusive Music?

There are different understandings of inclusion in music education and community music research. In educational research inclusion is a contested term (Murdoch et al., 2022) often being understood as special needs education rather that education for all learners, which includes those with additional support needs (ASN) (McAuliffe, 2018). Limelight also take the view that rather than adapting an existing music education programme to accommodate specific needs or disabilities, music workshops should be inclusive of everyone in the room no matter what their needs are. This has implications for the choice of songs, instruments and activities. One of the really interesting aspects of the research was seeing Limelight work in the same school with four different classes. Workshops began in the same manner, with the same songs, however, over the course of the 9 month programme, activities quickly changed, and were personalised by and adapted for each class. Consequently, the classes had their own specially curated journey, with Limelight devising activities and songs for each group.

During workshops, practitioners found ways for everyone to join in, for example through using guitars in open tuning. They didn’t use notation, all of the activities built up songs and pieces from memory. One song which all the classes used in some way was ‘Huran Da’ (a song which uses Gaelic vocables. It is a deceptively simple with only 2 chords but I’ve seen it extended to last over 15 minutes with long improvised instrumental sections. Improvisation was a key process in finding out more about the children and young people’s interests and creativity. In this way, improvisation was an important way for practitioners to appreciate participants ideas and start to incorporate these into pieces and songs.

Delivering in teams

The teams themselves are inclusive, for example Mark, who wears hearing aids, took them out of his ears so the children in one of the classes could see them. His natural honesty is a feature of many if not all of the practitioners; there’s no sense of anyone ‘putting on’ any kind of other ‘teacher’ identity other than their own. I wrote about this ‘personalisation’ in a previous article (MacGlone et al. 2023), it means that within the company, everyone can find their own way of delivering workshops. This is within the context of team facilitation. Flexibility in leadership was also apparent, with Gordon and Fletcher stepping back and allowing trainees to lead sections of the workshops. The method of team delivery was certainly lively at times, in the special schools we worked in, ratios of staff to students are larger than in mainstream schools. As well as this, there is usually at least one other member of support staff and/or medical staff present. Practitioners included everyone in the room – much to the initial surprise of the staff. This, however, was important, having the focus of everyone  in the room on the activity allowed staff to see children in new ways. Staff also learnt the songs and reported singing them at other times in the week.

The next blog will describe one workshop where a child became particularly upset, and how the practitioners, staff and other children responded to her, making music to hold space for this child until she felt better.

REFERENCES

MacGlone, U. M., Wilson, G. B., Vamvakaris, J., Brown, K., McEwan, M., & Macdonald, R. A. (2022). Exploring approaches to community music delivery by practitioners with and without additional support needs: A qualitative study. international journal of community music, 15(3), 385-403. Available from https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/330171427/Macglone2022IJCMCMDelivery.pdf

McAuliffe, L. (2018). Inclusion for All? In T. G. K. Bryce, W. M. Humes, D. Gillies, A. Kennedy, T. Bryce, J. Davidson, D. Gillies, T. Hamilton, G. Head, W. Humes, A. Kennedy, & I. Smith (Eds.), Scottish Education: Fifth Edition (pp. 697–706). Edinburgh University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv1kz4g7s.80

Murdoch, D., English, A.R., Hintz, A. and Tyson, K., 2020. Feeling heard: Inclusive education, transformative learning, and productive struggle. Educational Theory, 70(5), pp.653-679.

Making and using graphic scores: blog 1

A rewarding part of my BA Postdoctoral Fellowship is to investigate inclusive and flexible strategies in creative music workshops for children and young people with additional support needs (ASN). Graphic scores have been part of my repertoire of activities for delivering creative music workshops over 15 years. I have found them to be very effective across different age groups and for children with and without ASN.

A recent book chapter, Frames for Improvising (MacGlone, 2022) goes into detail about workshop activities I’ve developed and used over the years including warm-ups, conduction, working with pictures and symbols and free improvisation. What I’m working on now is to extend my thoughts about graphic scores both in the choice of materials I’m using and pedagogical approaches.

Graphic scores can use images, text, different forms of notation and combinations of these elements with varying levels of choice possible for participants depending on the composers’ intent and instruction. Individuals can have ‘their own visual, emotional, musical, sensory and aesthetic perception(s) of a score’ (MacGlone 2021). Although I wrote this about the process of creating a score for a group of professional musicians, this aligns with my experiences of making scores with people of all ages.

As a field of practice and an artistic process, graphic scores have had periods of focused interest and development for example in the 1950s and 60s (Wimbish, 2020). Using them in music education offers potential for developing children’s creativity and agency (Reybrouck et al., 2009). However, in common with other improvisation strategies, they can be used with different educational purposes (MacGlone & Johansen, 2024).

Musical dots

I have used graphic scores with different age groups. For very young children, GIObabies is a series of workshops for children from 0-5 years and their carers. Workshop content is a mixture of known songs, made up songs, free improvisations, graphic scores and conduction. Every workshop is different as a key aspect for the facilitators is to respond to the people in the room and base activities on the best option for the group at the time.

The following graphic score was created in 2015, with a group of 4 children ranging from 8 months – 36 months. Each child was invited to pick a coloured sticky dot and to place it on the page. We then asked the children for sounds to represent the dots. We, (myself and flute player Emma Roche) played the dots which were babbling, singing and clapping and squeaky sounds, improvising between dots. We played this score a few times, pointing to the different dots when it was time for children to make the new sound with us. The oldest child pointed to her dot when she wanted to hear her particular sound.

A walk in nature

The next score comes from a project in 2019 in a Glasgow Nursery with children aged 4 and 5. We had three musicians, myself on bass, Emma on flute again and Stu Brown on drums. To tie in with their topic, we invited children to create a narrative for a ‘walk in nature’ which we would play music for with the children on small percussion instruments, body percussion and voice. We (practitioners and children) made symbols for leaves, sun, stars, clouds, rain and chose different types of music material to represent them. The children created their own ways to direct the music as well as choosing the order of the symbols. In the next picture J held up two cloud symbols. He didn’t tell us what he wanted us to play, it was a spontaneous action. In response to this, we instinctively played louder and more intensely which he said was ‘cool’. Later, he showed us the leaf symbol and experimented with movement, first holding it up high and moving it gently. He increased the number and intensity of movements until we were playing loudly and rhythmically  - still trying to preserve the musical features of our original leaf music

In this project, children could personalise their contribution, by decorating symbols, by telling the musicians what they wanted the symbols to sound like - ‘that’s not starry enough’ - for star music and by moving to give the musicians further directions for dynamics, pitch and pulse with their bodily gestures

Affordances and next steps

It is interesting to reflect on what happened – both of the examples were remembered from successful workshops. The children enjoyed themselves and were very engaged with the activity which was commented on positively by the adults who were with them. In particular, a nursery teacher commented on how the activity held J’s attention in a way that most other nursery activities didn’t. Thinking about the affordances – the possibilities for action that children have provides a useful starting point -  however - this can become complicated in a workshop where practitioner decision making is based on ‘in-the-moment’ choices. I’ve worked with both musicians for over 20 years, when we are delivering workshops there are many decisions happening very quickly and they are often negotiated non-verbally – through eye contact, gesture and through our improvised music.  

I will be looking at communicative processes in workshops – but first I thought it best to investigate the nature of materials that can be used for making graphic scores. These materials in themselves invite ways for children to participate and engage their imaginations. In early 2022, I was awarded a small internal grant from Edinburgh College of Art which made it possible to work with a community artist (Jean McEwan) who used collage as a participatory and artistic method in her work. I had used her ‘instant graphic score packs’ (written about here) in workshops for a few years with adults with success and wondered how they may work for children and young people with ASN.

The next blog will examine the role of my partners, Limelight Music and important processes in their approach to delivering music.

References

MacGlone, U. M.  (2021) ‘Visual strategies for sound: the key to graphic scores’ The Wire [online] Available at: [Accessed 18.08.22] https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/visual-strategies-for-sound-the-key-to-graphic-scores

MacGlone, U.M. (2022) ‘Frameworks for Improvising’. In General Music: Dimensions of Practice Abril, C. R. & Gault, B. M. (eds), New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

MacGlone, U. M., & Gravem Johansen, G. (2024). Teaching free improvisation: European higher music education teachers’ conceptual tools. International Journal of Music Education.

Reybrouck, M., Verschaffel, L., Lauwerier, S. (2009). Children’s graphical notations as representational tools for musical sense-making in a music-listening task. British Journal of Music Education, 26(2), 189–211.

Wimbish, R. (2020). ‘Is this your composition, or is this some sort of collaboration?’ Examining a professional musician’s attitude towards graphic composition. Music & Practice, 6. https://www.musicandpractice.org/volume-6/examining-a-professional-musicians-attitude-towards-graphic-composition/