Children and Champions

I don't watch a lot of TED talks - but there is one that I really like. It is called 'Every Child Needs A Champion', and I find it really inspiring. It was made by a wonderful teacher who has now left this world called Rita Piearson.

It is here, if you want to watch it..... Every child needs a champion
I watch this often, and it reminds me of why I do what I do.

Not so long ago, I found myself standing up for a particular child. This little person has really given her teachers the run-around, apparently. She isn't very pleasant in other classes. I don't teach her very often, but she has always been lovely for me. She is a musical little soul - she sings beautifully, and has always really responded to music in class. Whenever she sees me she greets me by name, and smiles, and sometimes even gives me a hug. I like her a lot. I appreciate that she can be trouble, and she has a mouth on her - but, actually, I don't see that. I see a basically decent kid.

I wanted her to participate in some classes I was taking, and the powers-that-be in her school said no. She hadn't behaved in some other classes, and so they were going to use no music classes as a punishment. But I work for a charity who try and engage kids just like her. So I stood up for her.

Well, I was told I was being manipulated. I was wrong. I was being taken for a ride. That she would disappoint me. That she was no good. Other teachers got angry with me. In fact, a few got really angry with me.

I had to talk to a few trusted souls, people whom I respect, to check that I was doing the right thing. Was I really being manipulated by this child? Should I give her a go? (I don't know about you, but if enough people tell me I am doing the wrong thing, I'll at least think about it.....) But deep down something told me I should put my neck on the chopping block for this kid. And my trusted friends agreed with my inner voice.

So I got shouted at, and told that I was doing the wrong thing some more. I trod on toes, and had heads shaken at me in disbelief. I was told I was a fool.

But she was in my classes, and she participated. And she had a good time. She performed with me - and even smiled. She was polite, and helpful.

My heart breaks for this little person who as blown all her chances where she is. She's a good kid. In fact, sometimes she's a lovely kid.

But I found it hard sticking up for her.
But I'd do it again.
And again.
She was worth it.

Singing proudly

I am lucky enough to work quite closely with the good people of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Sometimes they send a quartet out to a school, and I run a facilitated concert with these wonderful players, teaching children about different ways to play stringed instruments, or about concepts like 'ostinato', or 'ground bass'.

But this week, we did something different.

I am at one school where there are a lot of children with really difficult little lives. Lots of family members in prison. Lots of kids having to look after themselves a lot of the time. You know the sort of stuff.... I write about it often. I've said it all before. Three terms ago, some girls in years 3-6 came to me and asked if I could start a choir with them, so that they could get together to sing weekly. So the senior choir was born. In term one I had 14 girls. In term 2 it jumped to 22. In term 3 it stayed at 22 - and we had a concert to prepare for.

The ACO was going to send out a quartet to perform with these girls. So I had to come up with four songs that would work well with a quartet backing these young voices, and that the girls would be happy rehearsing for 8 weeks. I thought I had come up with a good four - and then sent the to the ACO for arranging.

Two weeks out from the concert, and the girls were restless. The songs didn't sound very polished. None of the girls would really look at me. They wouldn't stand still. I was worried. Would they be put off by the quartet? Would they actually be able to do this, or would the wheels fall off? (Also, I am a cellist - I am not a choral conductor, so my conducting is a bit patchy......)

A week out from the concert and I was cranky in rehearsal.
'Look at me!! I can help you!'
'Why don't you know these words?'
'Why can't you stand still?'

The day of the concert came (it always does). One girl who is chronically late to school was waiting at the gate before 8 am (school starts at 9). EVERYONE in the choir was at school. Two of them even told me that they had gone to bed early the night before so they could concentrate.

I started the rehearsal by allowing the girls to hear the quartet playing the accompaniment to one of the songs, in the hope that they would get used to the sound. I started off the ACO players and then watched faces. Now, these girls weren't to know that they were playing with some of the best players in the country (although I was appreciating that!) - but their faces showed it. Little grins turned to big grins. Jaws dropped. Heads nodded.
'They're deadly!' says one girl.

You know, I shouldn't have worried about anything.
All that sleep I lost? I should have trusted those little people.
They weren't put off by anything.
They stood - tall, proud, and looking at me. In fact, most of them didn't take their eyes off me.
They were still.
They knew all the words.
They sang with all their hearts.

And they sounded FANTASTIC. They performed for their peers, and lots of  special visitors. They were wonderful. Their school cheered them. I cheered them. Their teachers were amazed.

So many of the kids in this school are brow-beaten and down-trodden. They are told they are no good, stupid, worthless..... Well, for an hour, my 22 girls RULED THE SCHOOL. They were the best they could have been - and then some.

I was one seriously proud music teacher.

Red dust and emus

You know, I have a pretty amazing job. I get to go to some pretty fabulous places, and do some fabulous stuff. Unfortunately, it also involves getting on some little planes. That part I don't like. But the rest of it I do.

Last week I had to catch one of those little planes. I was looking out the window in Sydney, in a huge storm, dreading it. And as usual, the pilot looked about twelve, and I was horribly nervous. And when I sat down in these incredibly uncomfortable seats, my knees were up around my ears. (Who builds these planes? Midgets? Who is EVER comfortable in these seats?)

But I landed in Broken Hill in one piece.

On one day I taught at Broken Hill primary, working with selected groups of 20 kids at a go. They were all very keen, and it was great fun. I was aware, though, that those were the good kids, or the ones that had some kind of musical interest. At the end of the day, I had all 220 kids in the school singing, which was pretty fun.

The next day I was picked up to be driven 4 and a half hours away from Broken Hill to a station called 'Reola', which is pretty famous in those parts. It has a HUGE sheep-shearing shed. It's really big - not like the big banana in Coffs Harbour, which isn't really that big, up close. But HUGE. (Did I say how big it was?) And it was dusty. And a bit breezy. And it was my classroom for the next two days. I had nearly 100 children from the School of the Air, based in Broken Hill, come to join me for their first-ever group musical experience at their latest 'mini school'.

The kids learnt a whole pile of stuff. New songs (one in parts). Rhythm reading. Rhythm games. Percussion parts. Names of instruments they'd never seen before. Performance skills.

Here's what I learnt in the shearing shed.......
Country kids are great. (Well, I knew that part already. But I was reminded of it again.) I wonder if it's a lot of time spent getting dirty outside, or a lack of screen-time, or a certain wildness that doesn't get trampled on. I don't know the answer. But I like them.

Most of those kids had never done anything musical before, and loved it. They sang children's songs, and drummed to wind band music, and danced to Don Spencer, and played along to Tchaikovsky. They reacted no differently to any of the music I played - they just loved it all.

If they don't know any different, boys love to sing.

Orange trousers don't show the dust so much.

If I jump around enough to 'I can run as fast as you' by Peter Combe, first thing in the morning, I can take off my coat and not feel like the Michelin man when I teach.

Dads wearing big hats will also sing 'A Ram Sam Sam' as long as you tease them a bit first.

Dams are called 'tanks' that far west.

And don't let the Dorper sheep in with the Merino sheep, otherwise the price of the merino wool goes down.

If you open your mind too much your brains will fall out

So here's what has happened to me over the last few days.

I've been involved in a conversation with someone about performing more contemporary Australian music. I'll say this up front - I don't search out a lot of it, and I don't really enjoy playing it. How do I create new programs?I often have the radio on at home, to discover new things that I haven't come across before, and friends send me things they have heard or played too. I sometimes sit and wade through pages on the internet looking for compositions to perform. But it's generally not contemporary music. It's mainly stuff by dead people. Music that has been played before.

And I got told the other day to be more open-minded. That I might find something that I actually like - and surprise myself. And that the audience might like it too. Now, first I got cross at the patronising tone that these sentences had been delivered to me. But then I thought about it. And talked to a few people about it. Perhaps this critic had a point. (If you wanted to save time, I'd just scroll down to the last sentence, or you could read my reasoning.....)

And so here's what I thought......
I don't get paid much for the concerts I run. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind that. But I do them because I love playing the sort of music I program, and I love communicating this music to the players I work with, and the audience who comes to share it. And so I want to play music I love. Not stuff I think I 'should' play.

Do I have a duty to play contemporary music? No, I don't believe I do. I feel that my duty is to communicate the love of music to others, and that's the only duty I want. I do this duty (that I have chosen) by teaching in schools, and training other teachers, and performing as well. That is the battle I have chosen. Not to champion contemporary music.

And if this music is good, shouldn't other people want to play it too, rather than just me being duty-bound to play it? I guess you could counter that argument by saying that a lot of composers that are now popular (Arvo Part, for instance), all had a champion at one point (Gidon Kremer), because there was a time that they weren't popular. So maybe I should be doing that too. But I am not Kremer. I am not travelling the world, playing what I want, with huge budgets. I do not have time on my hands to learn really hard pieces that take hours and hours and HOURS to perfect.

And actually, if it boils down to it - I don't really like contemporary music. I listen to it with friends at times - 'Listen to this! This is great!' they say, laughing. And I find it makes me uncomfortable. My spirit soars when I listen to Bach, or Dvorak, or some gem I have discovered. And right now, at this stage in my life, I choose to play the music that gives back to me. I mightn't do it forever. But right now I will.

So am I close-minded? Possibly. I think I am more interested in putting percussion to Bach suites, and exploring works I can play with piano accordion, and adapting Mendelssohn songs for different sorts of instruments, and championing education in primary schools, especially to children who wouldn't normally get it. If that makes me close-minded then I will happily be so.

My great hero, Mr T. Minchin, once said 'If you open your mind too much, your brains will fall out.'.

Solving a puzzle.....

When I am working on a new piece of music, I nearly always start the same way. I will go through and work out some kind of fingering that will work for the piece, so that I can start to turn my musical muddling into phrasing and something that sounds like what the composer intended. And then I will research what it is I'm playing - who the composer was, what he (or she - but usually a he) played, what else they wrote, when the piece was written, what it was originally written for - all that sort of stuff.

Now, as a child, I was always reading the back of record covers. I was fascinated by who these composers actually were. I can remember, aged about 14, becoming quite obsessed about how everyone died - Peter Warlock gassed himself, Bartok had leukaemia, Tchaikovsky died of cholera...... I would share this information with anyone who would listen. I am still interested in who these chaps (and sometimes gals) actually were, and I find myself, when I'm teaching students (of any ages), talking about their lives. Children love it, and even adults seem to be interested (or it could be an act, letting the mad 'cellist ramble on....)

In the age of Google and the Internet, this is an easy task. Type in 'Felix Mendelssohn', and you're off. No trip to the library, no heavy encyclopaedias, no imposing librarians.

So why don't more people do this?

Why do I walk into rehearsals with other musicians and they haven't done it? Surely this is all useful, and sometimes necessary as a professional musician, at least as a Classical one? It helps to know that the piece I'm playing was originally a song for a soprano. I will have to really think about breathing, and how I need to 'sing' it, as a 'cellist, rather than play it. It helps me to know that Brahms wasn't a string player, so his 'cello lines will be a bit awkward to play - and I have to get around them thinking like a pianist. It helps me to know a little bit about composer's personalities - if they were a bit mad, or a bit depressed, or madly in love at the time. As I work out the musical puzzle of how best to play this piece of music written for me to recapture and share with others, I feel that these clues are vitally important.

I had a rant about this to my highly-reasonable partner, who responded (in his highly-reasonable way), that possibly some players were more interested in their responses to a piece of music, rather than the history behind it. But this strikes me as lazy. As a Classically-trained cellist, my job is to take all of history (well, as much as I can), and learn all the rules - and then, if I choose to, with a good reason, break some/ most/ all / none of them. Because I feel that I owe it to the composer to do that - it's somehow respectful. And if I don't respect the composer, then I won't play their music.

I worked with a singer a little while back (I hardly ever work with singers. I mock them, mostly.), who walked into the first rehearsal we had, and talked about why they were going to sing the words in the way they were, and how they wanted the tempo - and gave all these reasons. Not in a boring-I'm-going-to-lecture-you-for-hours way, but in a  concise-I've-thought-this-through way. I whooped with joy.

But this is the exception, rather than the rule. People don't wonder about stuff like this. Players can tell me what celebrity wore what to where, but not what Messiaen  played as we start to rehearse his music.

And I wonder why.

Singing and self-esteem

I teach at a school on a Monday where self-esteem is pretty thin on the ground. I see this a fair bit, especially with young girls. When girls hit about ten or eleven, it seems that when the hormones kick-in, self-esteem recedes like a wave leaving the shore. They start to criticise everything and everyone around them - but most damagingly, themselves.

I get so angry when I hear them comparing themselves to air-brushed pictures in magazines, or videos of pop stars. And at no point do they talk about air-brushing, or the hours it takes in hair and make-up before any cameras roll. They just try and work out how they can make themselves look like that, by not eating, or madly exercising. And all this in primary school.

And with the striving to be thin comes the inevitable comments about others or themselves. "She's fat. She's ugly. I'm fat. I'm crap. I can't do anything. I'm no good." The list goes on and on. I saw this with girls I went to uni with. I saw this with girls younger than me in high school. And now, heart-breakingly, I see it in primary-aged kids.

So, back to me on Monday. I have a choir of twelve girls. They sing really well for a just-started choir, looked after by a 'cellist-who-isn't-really-a-choir-director. They are working on two songs for their upcoming ANZAC assembly. And it has dawned on them that they sound really good. That they can 'do' something really well. That they are a group that is doing something different, that's not been done at the school, and that they are sounding beautiful. And last Monday I watched these twelve girls grow in front of my eyes.

It was like watching a wilted plant get water and Seasol, and straighten and blossom on time-lapse photography. It was nothing short of magic.

At some point, everyone needs someone to say 'Hey! You do this really well! I like what you do!'. And that was me, to those little people. It was an excellent moment. All this through the power of singing.

As you finish reading this (if anyone does), now I want you to do something. Push back your hair, sit up a little bit straighter, and sing. Sing something. Anything. A children's song. A hymn. Something your gram used to sing to you. Even an advert jingle, if nothing else comes to mind.

I guarantee you'll feel better.

Go on, try it. For my girls.

Music dictation

For those of you who don't know, I spend two days a week teaching children in disadvantaged schools. These are my favourite days of the working week, actually. They are the most exhausting. I come home completely drained - I feel a bit like a wrung-out flannel. But I absolutely love guiding these kids through their music lessons.

Most of these little people I see every week have experience more in their short lives that I have in my much longer one. Some of their stories break my heart, and when I am tired and worn out at the end of the year I come home and weep for them. But I am also amazed by their resilience and their resistance - and encouraged by their laughter and smiles when I see them. They are the best kids in the world, and I am hopeful for every one of them. They are our country's future, and deserve all the love and compassion and care that teachers give them.

But this is not one of my many rants about how teachers are unsung heroes and are woefully underpaid. Nor is it a rant about arts in schools and how it is dangerously underfunded. It is a post about a new thing I've started teaching at one of my schools.

After talking with a wonderful university lecturer just before Christmas, I decided that I would teach the older kids at one school in particular rhythm dictation. For those of you who don't know what I'm on about, it's when the teacher claps a particular rhythm, and the listener writes it down using music notation. Writing this post now, I realise that it might sound a bit dry and boring. Actually, it is a bit dry. It's music theory. But I thought I'd give it a go.

And who would have thought? I tried it on three groups of thirty children. And they LOVE it. Not a bit - but a whole lot. I did it again yesterday using crotchets, quavers and rests. And every child gave it a red-hot go - and without exaggerating, nearly all of them got it right. Kids who can't really spell could write correctly what I clapped at them. Kids who really struggle with conventional learning were achieving. There where whoops of joy as I gave the answer to each little dictation. The only problem I had was regular complaints from these little people that there were no semiquavers being used. The three class teachers who I asked to revise it in their class over the week all did it - in fact one teacher does it a number of times during the day to begin new lessons (like an art lesson, or a maths lesson), because the kids like it so much.

It was a lesson to me to not presume that children would like something because I don't. Or because other teachers tell me it's boring. Or people tell me that 'kids like that won't respond to that sort of teaching'.

Roll on next week. I shall include semiquavers!

Playing dangerously

Well, it all happened.

My partner (who was also going to produce the disc) and I loaded up the car last Monday with the cello, the piano stool and everything that we could possibly need, and drove to Melbourne. Sadly, my car had no air-conditioning, and it got to 40 degrees for about 5 hours. (I thought that was bad until we had to come back. It was 42 degrees for about 8 hours in the car. It was so hot my rosin melted. It was one of the outer circles of hell in my Fiesta on the return trip - I hope I never have to do that again....)

We talked a lot on the way down about what my aims were - to be as creative as I could, and to trust the engineers and everyone else. I was nervous - but also a little excited. I had also talked at great length to two musician friends of mine who do a fair amount of recording, and they warned me about changing things in the studio because of the dry sound. I had also spent the week before going to Melbourne really carefully trying to get even more attuned to my cello and the feel of it, as I knew I'd be playing in a very dry, unforgiving room, and the sound I heard in that room wouldn't be the sound that would be heard by others.

Tuesday arrived - day one of recording. It took about 3 hours to set up the microphones. Again, I'd been warned about this. 'Be patient' I was told. This is like telling the bull to not go into the china shop. The 3 hours felt like 3 years. And at the end, even 3 decades. Obviously test number 1 for the nervous cellist.

Then finally we started. I was surrounded by sound baffles - imagine three large screens set up around me, with only one opening. I'm not sure if this was to create blinkers for me, so I couldn't be distracted, or it actually really did affect the sound. The only thing I could see was my recording partner sitting in front of me, with his accordion strapped to him and a large smile on his face. He'd done this lots of times before, so was pretty calm about the whole thing. And so I let him musically take my hand, and start walking with me down the road, as it were. My only thought to myself was to be with him in the moment - I needed to respond to everything he gave me. And he is an outstanding musician. I needed to take every little subtlety he played, and use it, and give him back as much as he gave me.

And would you believe it? It worked. I didn't have a bad time at all. In fact, in some moments I really enjoyed playing and recording it. I enjoyed pushing some barriers (musically, not the sound baffles around me). I enjoyed weaving in and out of the sound that was offered up to me. I enjoyed playing very dangerously at times - pushing my cello to the limit, or playing so intimately neither of us could look at each other. There were some horrible moments. I swore a lot over a little phrase in a piece that should have been easier. I cursed my inability to play an octave at one point. I worried as my walking partner disappeared in frustration over a part in another piece. But all in all, it wasn't all bad.

It was a huge lesson in trust for me. It was a lesson in self-belief. It was a lesson in patience.

I might even do it again, sometime.

Now I have a mountain of sleeve notes to write, and meetings with my fabulous graphic designer friend. There are tracks to be edited and mastered. But the scaffolding has been well and truly put up, with very little shouting.

Different types of musicians

Last night, I went to have dinner with some friends of mine. Both professional musicians, both in their fifties. Unlike so many other musicians I know, they are both still really engaged with being musicians. They still want to share music with others - by performing, teaching, coaching and listening. I find them both incredibly inspiring. They are also both really normal. They have other interests. Their feet are well and truly on the ground - and their heads are.... well, where they should be. Not up anything, as the saying goes.

On the way there I was reflecting about these two, and how much I respect them both. And they are the sort of players where their goal is simply to share music. They walk on stage and seem to say to their audience (without saying it out loud, of course) "Look! We have found this piece of music! It's just wonderful. We'll play it to you the best we can - and hopefully you'll think it's really wonderful too.... Have a listen." There is a real ego-less way of being and playing.

Then there are other sorts of performers. They walk on stage and say "Look! Look at me! Listen to how I play this! I'm great! You should notice me!". And they fill their conversations with their friends and colleagues about how they were noticed the other day, or should have been noticed by others, or how well their CD sales are, or how much they have been played on the radio.

The second sort of musicians are often far more successful. They have the names that you would know, if you were not in 'the business'. I find them phonies (thanks Holden Caulfield). I try to be around them as little as possible. And sometimes, these known names are not like the second type of performer. But, in my opinion (and after all, this is only my opinion), not so much.

I really believe that performing is not about fame. It is not about being noticed. It is about sharing. And for the sort of performer who doesn't even write their own music, it is about me even less. It is about Bach, or Bloch, or whoever. It isn't about adulation, or travel, or being noticed. It is simply about taking dots on the page, and turning them into something that makes others smile, or cry, or remember that wonderful day and how they felt.

I hope, when I am in my fifties and beyond, that I am like these two people.

Creativity under fire

If anyone has been reading this (or the facebook posts for 'Bach in the Dark') they will know that at the end of January I'm recording a disc.

This is a big deal for me, as every recording project I have ever done has been hugely unpleasant. There is always something that goes horribly wrong - someone can't play something, there's too much noise outside, it's freezing cold, egos get in the way.... this list goes on and on.

But after two years of a dear friend (and a musician I admire so very much) asking me to record with him, I have said I'd try it one more time. If I was going to record with anyone, it would be him. I have decided not to listen to raw takes - I am bringing down a very trusted pair of ears (that do not belong to me) to listen to the takes, as I know that at the first whiff of an out-of-tune anything, I will stop being creative and imaginative, and become some kind of uninteresting cello-playing robot. And that wouldn't be true to everything I hold dear as a performer.

So, for better or worse (hopefully better), I am going to Melbourne to be a creative cellist with lots of patience as we have to do things a number of times to get everything right. (I am not so patient. That will be hard. Not as hard as the last Bartok piece we're doing, though.)

We rehearsed a lot last weekend. We gave a little concert to some friends who gave up their Sunday afternoon to come a tell us what they thought. We've talked endlessly about how things are going to go. A recording schedule has been drafted. I have so many callouses I could stick pins in most of my fingers and not feel a thing.

So it's nearly upon me. I am reminded of my favourite quote (at the moment) about creativity, by Anna Funder. "This is the trick to creative work : it requires a slip-state of being, not unlike love. A state in which you are both most yourself, and most alive and yet least as sure of your own boundaries, and therefore open to everything and everyone outside of you."

Here goes........

Holidays....

I've just come back from a week away down the south coast. My long-suffering, very patient partner (aka 'The Bear') and I escaped Sydney and went to stay in a little house with four other really dear friends. The little house it a bit neglected, but charming. The balcony wobbles. The oven is terrible. The stair-rail up the side of the house wouldn't pass an OHS test. As someone climbs the stairs, the whole house wobbles like a firm blancmange. But it was the most perfect place to be.

We talked a lot. Read. I knitted (my new hobby). There was a lot of laughter. Lots of wine, champagne and some fabulous cider. Loads of Maltesers (TM). And these people put me back together after a pretty huge year. My job is excellent, don't get me wrong. But it wears me out by the end of the year. I feel like an old flannel in some grotty Laundromat. Being around five wonderful people for a week was the most excellent thing.

I also had to take the cello with me. I am recording a CD at the end of January, which terrifies me. Every recording experience I have done up to this point has been incredibly stressful and really, I'd rather have root canal work. But I have agreed to try it again with my dear 'musical brother' accordion-playing-whizz. So I had to slope off for a few hours every day to practise.

It was a really enjoyable process, having the space to be creative. To try a few new things here and there. And to really enjoy playing again.

So here's to 2014. I'm planning a year with many things in it. Some terrify me. Some I've done before. Some I've been wanting to do for a while. But I'm hugely optimistic. And smiling. Could be the result of an excellent week away. Thank you to the Bear, the Cabin Boy, the Wordsmith, the Colour Guru and the Lens-Cap Operator. I love youse all.