Our Biennale is a festival of arts and culture made with children and young people in Kirklees. Throughout the festival musicians, artists, theatre-makers, and choreographers work with schools, colleges, and communities to enable children and young people to make their very own remarkable pieces of music, art, drama, and dance.
Part of the Kirklees Local Cultural Education Partnership, EvoKe, Our Biennale happens every two years, and for this edition of the festival, hcmf// have been working on two projects in the Huddersfield area.
Since January 2021, we’ve been working with Greenhead College’s Experimental Music Group, led by course tutor and artist John Clyde Evans. John’s mission with the group at the very start of term was to introduce the group to a brief history of experimental music including indeterminacy, microtones and noise. This preparation helped the group become open minded to new musical ideas in preparation for the second half of the project, composing their own works.
Due to Covid-19 restrictions, we had to work to creatively come up with a suitable remote teaching solution for our Learning & Participation programme. We were incredibly lucky to employ the creative skills of multi-instrumentalist and composer Richard Youngs, who rose to the challenge and agreed to share his wealth of compositional knowledge via Microsoft Teams once a week from his home in Glasgow. Where there’s a will! Together, John and Richard have been leading the once a week class to an enthusiastic and dedicated group of young people. A mixture of musicians and non-musicians.
An improviser and DIY musician known for his versatile approach to making and collaborating on music, Youngs has embraced many different genres of sound, and has created plenty of pieces that are structurally different, if not structureless. Encouraging the music group to focus on sounds they might think of as ‘uninteresting’, such as traffic hum, Youngs delighted to see the students try making something ‘quieter, slower, less energetic’ together, noting that they often thought of their collaborations as ‘better and more musical with less’.
Over the course of 8 weeks the group have covered all manner of topics, following a lesson structure set by Richard who got them thinking about what it meant to make experimental music with a focus on improvisation and importantly group dynamics. How can your own actions as a musician change how the others will react? Improvisation doesn’t have to just be a load of people showing off their chops – how can it instead be something shared, a cohesive sum of parts that join to create a great sounding ensemble?
In one lesson, the group followed simple directions such as playing at different speeds, considering how playing energy can impact the sound, and a variety of volumes were explored. The group recorded the pieces, listened back, thought about what they had done and how things could be improved. Can you repeat an improvisational piece? Would you even want to try? The group learned by doing, and despite the challenge of being taught all these new ideas and techniques via someone 182 miles away, it worked wonderfully!
The students at Greenhead College are still working with Richard and John and you will be able to hear the end results of the group’s work during the weekend of 19-20 June, during the Our Biennale Finale and alongside other projects the festival has in store. We can’t wait!