Music Education – Making Music

The Borders Youth Music Forum has been going for a number a years under the project name SoundCycle. Funding and lockdown temporarily halted things for but we held a digital meeting this week via MS Teams to get the forum going again.

A good cross section of people attended representing music tutors and providers, venues, music organisations and brass bands.

We had input from Kelsey Jubin, Creative Learning Officer(YMI) at Creative Scotland, who talked to us about current funding opportunities. In summary the funds were the;

Targeted Fund for 20 key national organisations
Small Grants Fund for artist led activities, opening in January 2021
Youth Arts Access fund for individuals and organisations, with a deadline on the 12th of November.

Kelsey also highlighted the Nurturing Talent Fund overseen by Young Scot and a new Hardship Fund opening on the 26th of October. This was open to musicians, craft makers and visual artists and Kelsey suggested visiting the Help Musicians website for more details. https://www.helpmusicians.org.uk/

See this post for more details about these funds.

Mae Murray from MEPG (Music Education Partnership Group), talked about its priorities and the new activities it was undertaking. Its primary roles were to be an advocate for music education, increase opportunities and reduce inequalities, bring together music educators and relevant organisations and to support the sector through training and advice.

Mae highlighted a new report, to be released shortly, about the levels of aerosol release from singing and instrument playing. MEPG also runs a very active youth Forum which is led by the young people.

During lockdown MEPG ran several digital projects including Doorstep Samba, Over the Rainbow, and the Hey Jude, Sunday sessions. Mae then introduced the training sessions that MEPG are going to be delivering over the next few months and details of these will be sent out in a further email. They are all available through Eventbrite and on the new MEPG website www.wemakemusicscotland.org.

Thanks for everyone’s input and we will keep you posted about the next meeting.

For November’s in-service day music staff from the YMI project, the Music Instrumental Service and our Music Curriculum Support Teacher’s got together to hear from music educator Paul Harris.

Paul has written over six hundred books about music education and writes for major international music magazines. He performs regularly and is an examiner and an adjudicator at national events.

At our session he talked about his Simultaneous Learning approach to instrumental and singing teaching. There was so much to take in, both practical ideas and the theory of learning. One of the themes that really came across was the need for a teacher to be an empowering guide to their students, collaboratively going on a learning journey with them. His ‘Map of the Musical World’ is a practical presentation of the musical ingredients that learners need to develop. It helps both student and teacher move through, and make connections between, these ingredients to embed the learning and develop their skills.

We are already considering how we can bring Paul back to expand into group or whole class teaching and inspire non specialist class teachers.