In the second block of music listening workshops that I'm doing in schools I started working with a new Edinburgh primary - Dalry. This school has replaced Pirniehall. Preston Street will continue as the school on Wednesdays. The idea behind this structure is for me to guage the level of perception and understanding of the partcipants at Preston Street (who have already had 4 weeks of workshops) against the thoughts of the children at Dalry (who are just starting).
The first workshop back was all about sampling. We listened to music which sampled other pieces of music or sounds to create something new. I knew this would be an interesting way to start off some conversations with the groups as sampling calls into question the issue of identity and authorship in music. I was looking forward to asking questions about originality and what consitutes as a musical sound.
The first piece that we listened to was New Process by the Canadian dj Akufen. This is a short track that is comprised almost entirely out of very short snippets of samples from other pieces of music and sounds. The tiny fragments of found sound are spliced together to form a jumpy, edgy soundworld that is at once very danceable and also slightly unnerving due to the tiny pieces of familiarity. I asked the participants to listen out for how many samples they thought were used in the piece. In truth, I didn't know the answer to this but the children all agreeed that were lots! Overall the piece was very popular and one boy at Preston Street even asked me to write down the name of the artist so he could go and listen to more of his music. A great result!
We then listened to excerpts form two differnet tracks back to back. The first was Jimmy by the British female rapper M.I.A. The second was a Bollywood track called Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy by Parvati Khan. The M.I.A. track samples the whole of the Parvati Khan track whilst adding new vocals and lyrics, and altering the beats. The result is two tracks which sound very similar but are, in my mind at least, entirely different. The kids were all dancing about to the M.I.A. track but when the Parvati Khan track came on there were lots of quizzical looks and mutterings of, "this is the same piece of music". Afterwards I explianed the differences in composition and we discussed what effect this has on the piece. I also explained that the M.I.A. track uses an Indian piece of music to colour lyrics about civil war in Rwanda and that, by so doing, the artist makes a political comment about the world being smaller than we think. This was quite a serious discussion and the children at Preston Street were more equipped to involve themselves in it than the kids at Dalry.
A drawing task was next up and this week I asked them to draw whilst listening to a nine minuite piece of sound art called 57A by Bernhard Gal. This piece is comprised entirely from samples taken from the tram of the title. Slowly patterns begin to emerge out of the field recordings as the artist creates rhythms through layering and juxtaposition. He also uses filters to process some of the sounds and this gave rise to some very interesting results in the children's drawings. The processing turns the voice of the tram's tannoy system into something very robotic or alien. At both schools this resulted in drawings which fused the literal (most children drew trains) with the fantastical (some children added talking robots, UFOs and aliens).
The final piece we listened to this week was the first movement of Cantus Arcticus by Einojuhani Rautavaarra. This orchestral piece is often referred to as the Concerto for Birds and indeed is comprised of beautiful, soporific orchestral writing and samples of various birds calling and in flight. It is a mesmerising, haunting piece. The children at Dalry struggled with it. I think by this point they were quite tired and the piece was too tranquil; they wanted to continue to dance to music similar to the first pieces. The children at Preston Street however all really enjoyed it.
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