The main focus for the performance sessions this month has been to work on a variety of tracks to perform at the celebration at the Contemporary in April. This has given many of the young people the opportunity to collaborate and work with other young people that they do not usually produce work with. This has also been good for many of the young people's musical growth by giving them the ability to come out of their comfort zone as many of the mc's that attend sessions are used to just having studio time and rapping over a track.
These sessions have helped them to be more involved with the creation process of music from the offset by seeing how it is being implemented and also by having more input in the creation process instead of just writing lyrics for the track. This is something that many of the young people are yet to experience.
Looking back over the past month I believe that this process has and will continue to be beneficial for all the young people involved. This is great way to work collectively which forms a sense of togetherness and also helps to improve on their knowledge and understanding of structure, rhythm, melody and communication skills all of which are vitally important for the final performance in April.
One of the drawbacks of having performance sessions of this nature is that there are still going to be some people that do not feel comfortable performing in front of other people because this just not the way that they practise. One reason for this may be that they feel nervous however, as I discovered over the past month this has not been the case. The reason why this was caused is that some young people are scared of making mistakes when performing.
One thing that helped me to combat this problem and get the point across is a video I discovered on You Tube (see link below) with Anthony Wellington. The topic of the video was 'The Infinite Field of Ideas' What I took out of the video and what was also the main point of the discussion was that the instrument used to play music is just a tool and this can also be expressed on other instruments for example, drum kit, bass guitar and vocal. He went on to talk about how the lack of theory knowledge can be what is missing and restricting a musician from expressing their ideas.
The reason why this was useful is that this impressed on me that the young people come from different musical backgrounds furthermore, their knowledge and understanding will differ leading to different confidence levels when it comes to performing in front of people. However, by ensuring them that music music is an infinite field of ideas and freedom of expression is important they will be less likely to be disheartened by mistakes and focus on the freedom of expression and the infinite field of ideas.
