MMus Leadership Programme

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Curious 2017: MAP making - by 1st MMus student, Morgan Schoonover

Who is Rose Lipman and why am I going to her building? For the second weekend of MAP! 

 The theme for the first two days of Curious has finally been revealed.

 It is … (drum roll, please) … Make / Shift! 

 As we began preparing to react as teams of visual and musical artists, we discussed how this installation is different from something shown in a gallery because of the role of the viewers/audience.  In a gallery, a viewer moves freely, curating their own experience. Here, the experience is curated for them and they travel together. 

On the second day, Alistair McClymont shared some of his work alongside his thoughts on process. As a MAP team, we have been encouraged to think about the impact of work that has been stripped into something simple and conceptual, especially when there are several stripped ideas reacting to the same theme. Ali seemed to be the perfect artist for the day as his work is often about naturally occurring phenomena. Some of these things he noticed from his everyday life, and some he found through building a relationship with materials. Each team was then assigned a material to get to know through visuals and sound. After loads of trials, we set up a mock installation to share our work. 

Make/Shift takes place on July 3 and 4 at Barbican Exhibition Halls

https://www.barbican.org.uk/education/event-detail.asp?ID=21515

https://www.barbican.org.uk/education/event-detail.asp?ID=21520

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In Conversation - Dialogue Festival

In this episode we talk about Dialogue, an annual festival celebrating the diversity and creative talent of East London. This unique collaboration brings together Guildhall School musicians and techn

Listen to our podcast with Sigrun Griffiths, Programme Leader of the Guildhall Artist Masters Programme in Leadership plus students Maya Khaldi and Julia Koelmann as we discuss the inspiration behind the theme of this year's festival (Bedwyr William's exhibition 'The Gulch' at the Barbican Centre), the experience and process of working with a variety of community groups, and how it all fits in to the Leadership course..

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Dialogue: Outside In

Dialogue is an annual event which celebrates the diversity and creative talent of East London. This unique collaboration brings together Guildhall School mus...

Please follow the above link to see a short film we made about Dialogue: Outside In, which took place in the Broadway Theatre in February 2016.

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Dialogue 2017 - ‘Where the water curves’ by Morgan Schoonover, year 1 MMus Leadership student

The Dialogue Festival is an annual event that encourages and celebrates collaboration between students at Guildhall and community members of East London.  This year it is a two day festival featuring group performances by Her Dynamic, Powerhouse, The Eastbury School, Green Shoes Arts, The Broadway Playhouse Group, That!, (Im)Possibilties, Satellite Collective, Future Band, and The Messengers.  Each of these groups amidst a series of workshops lead by students and tutors of the Leadership course.  In addition to these group performances, there will be solo performances, workshops, and installations created by students on the BA Performance and Creative Enterprise course, the MMus Leadership course, and poets from Barbican Young Poets.  The students on the MA Collaborative Theatre Production and Design course have been working diligently and thoughtfully on transforming the space to us on a trek we will never forget.

The theme for the 2017 Dialogue Festival is Where the Water Curves, which was inspired by an installation in the Barbican called The Gulch by Welsh artist Bedwyr Williams.  A gulch is deep and narrow ravine in the land that has been carved over time by water.  In titling the festival, the students from Year 1 Leadership and the MA Collaborative Theatre Production and Design agreed that the relationship between the water and the land was powerful and interesting.  There is beauty and harmony in the way that water overcomes the land through persistence, while the land acts as a vessel and guide for the water.  It is a true and natural collaboration.

Each act will involve original music, poems, or installations inspired by the theme.  There have been so many unique processes and journeys that my words would consume the entirety of this issue, but I can say that the work I have heard so far has not only been tasty to the ear, but provides a wonderful look at who these groups of people are.  All of the people involved in the festival are from a wide array of backgrounds: some have learning difficulties, some are coping with mental health issues, and some came together to make music inspired by Sun Ra.  The festival will be rich with diversity, and I think that gives it an amazing depth and character.

I think that I can speak for everyone involved when I say that we really hope that you attend.  The festival is truly a web of collaboration, from the development of the theme to the performances that will take place, and we cannot wait to share.  See you there!

23 and 23 February, 6.30pm Broadway Theatre, Barking, IG11 7LS

Tickets are free but must be booked in advance via the School’s website.

http://www.gsmd.ac.uk/about_the_school/view_all_events/event_single_view/?tx_julleevents_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=4963

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Candombe drumming in La Plata, Argentina by Julia Koelmans (Year 1 MMus Leadership 2016-17). Photos by Rocio Berge

After autumn term ended, the Leadership 1st year students had the opportunity to go to La Plata, Argentina, for a two-week residency. Colectivo La Sonora, a group of local musicians, offered us workshops in traditional Argentine music and dance: candombe, folklore and tango. We also worked with them and a local music therapist to give a two-day workshop in orphanage Hogar San Patricio.

The beauty of the Argentine culture and music, and the generosity of the people we met, made the trip a really great experience. A highlight for me was the night that we ended the candombe module.

The van driver dropped us of at an abandoned train station, covered in street art. Between the old tracks, next to a campfire, was the candombe group La Minga, practicing their drumming. We were a bit intimidated at first (it sounded so good!), but the members of La Minga were very welcoming and taught us all their candombe tricks.

After some practicing we were ready for the real candombe: walking about 8 blocks through La Plata, while playing. Cars and busses had to drive around us, people passing by started dancing behind our procession, old ladies kissed those of us who were closest to the sidewalk… Shortly after we took off, it really hit me. This was a wonderful cultural tradition, and I was part of it!

To end the night, La Minga hosted a barbecue in a park. After everyone had some food and beers, someone grabbed a guitar and a drum. And soon we were listening to beautiful Argentine songs in the moonlight. It was a night that I’ll never forget.

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The Messengers - Autumn 2016 project, by Jillian Meyer (MMus Leadership year 1 student)

The Messengers is a musical collaboration between adults from St. Mungo's charity and students from Guildhall.  St Mungo's provides support for people recovering from homelessness.  The connection between St. Mungo's and Guildhall has existed for a few years now, and it has created a really unique musical experience.  When I first walked into the studio theatre in Milton Court on Friday I didn't know what to expect.  I had heard a lot about The Messengers, but was unsure as to what rehearsing with the band would be like.  I was immediately welcomed by long-standing members of the band, and felt like I was being ushered into someone's home.  This open and welcoming feeling lasted for the entire weekend!  The dynamic really serves the band well, as the music that was created over our time together was of a standard of quality and creativity that caught me by surprise.  It was wonderful to be a part of a band that consists of people from many different backgrounds and walks of life.  The love for music within the band is obvious just by watching everyone do their thing!  We went through a really interesting process for writing lyrics that everyone had a part in.  The result was a profound and eclectic assortment of words that ended up working together beautifully.  I had never before been involved in a truly collaborative song-writing experience such as this, and I truly felt that everyone took ownership of our creation.  I had a blast, and am looking forward to the next time that we're able to come together and perform in the Dialogue festival in February.

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CURIOUS LAB: UNFINISHED

Here are some images provided by contributing artists ahead of the Curious Lab: Unfinished showcase on Thursday 7 July in Hackney.

Click here to get more info and book tickets!

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARD CURIOUS, Part 3 - by Kate Smith, MMus Leadership student, Guildhall School of Music & Drama

At a certain point in the creative process, the telescoping of time demands commitment. With the deadline looming, you start having to judge what you’ve created: “this idea works for the piece, that idea will have to go”. You can no longer be idealistic about your original intent; you have to respond to the piece in its current manifestation. You could react to these demands with frustration and resistance, or you could take a deep breath and let go, trust that this is where process has led you. For example, at the beginning of our collaboration, Taka and I agreed that we wanted to use live performance and for the sound and image to be mutually generated. One week out from the first gig, and months of experiments later, our piece has evolved away from those aspirations, and that is all right. In the final work there are fragments and clear inspiration from many of the experiments we carried out. The voices of friends and family I interviewed, the multitude of odd sounds we recorded, the happy coincidences and accidents - they’ve all found their way in. And as our piece is actually about memory, it’s really lovely to see how so much of our process has been preserved and reflected in the final result. I have learnt an incredible amount by making this piece with Taka; practical lessons about eq, sound editing software, and writing for voices – as well as intangible lessons about trusting in the unknown, engaging in play, and powering on! I know the final show is going to be incredible, and I’m super excited to see everyone else’s work come to life. Wish us luck as we count down to the final day, and I hope to see you all there!

 https://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=19836

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS CURIOUS - by Amber Weerasinghe 

3RD YEAR BA (HONS) GRAPHIC DESIGN STUDENT - CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS

 It’s nearing the end of June, and all of a sudden we find ourselves eight days away from show day! As we begin our intense week of work at Sophie’s studio, there has been a palpable change of pace. Spending most days sharing audio and visuals, planning the physical elements of the show, feeding back to other groups and running off to try out the next steps, the place has developed a great buzz of creative productivity. As one of the Visual Artists taking part in the project, It’s safe to say that I am exhausted (as our Graduate Degree Show has also just opened to the public), but even more excited to be surrounded by the lovely, talented and inspiring people that have made our journey towards ‘We Astronomers’ so enjoyable thus far.

I have been teamed up with Maya Khaldi; a super talented singer with a love of Palestinian folk music. Soon after meeting my faah-bulous collaborative partner we bonded over homemade sage tea, and the mutual opinion that “zoos make us feel sad”, and realised we were well matched.

Working along the themes of time, memory and moments of poetic beauty, our collaborative work soon developed a powerfully emotive emphasis. This also led us to reflect upon the similarities in content between our two (traditionally very different) areas of practise.

Throughout our shared creative journey, we have been consistently involved in what may have previously been considered as the other person’s territory. We have strived to work together on both audio and visuals, preferring to think of the piece holistically, rather than assigning each creative to their own medium. This has worked fantastically well for us, and has led to a more organic creative process; along with some huge learning curves and a real appreciation for one another; both as professionals and as people. 

 As for our working dynamic, I find myself agreeing with the afore-mentioned; “11 Steps to a Collaboration”, as defined by Leadership Student, Kate, in her previous blogpost. Especially steps number ‘3: Woah this is awesome!’ and ‘10: Oh no! We need to rethink everything’, which Maya and I have developed the uncanny ability to ping-pong between, several times throughout a single conversation. Admittedly though, we have also developed the ability to repeatedly unstick ourselves from such cycles, which is something that we are both very grateful for. It is a rare occasion to discover a person you click with so effortlessly on a creative and personal level, and we have been fortunate enough to do just that.

Recent leaps forward in the development of our piece, and the freeing up of of our schedules, is proving for a very exciting week to come. These small breakthroughs have further ignited our passion and energy for the project. As such, I’d say that puts us solidly between stages 8 and 9 of the collaborative process, hoping that we can avoid too many more brushes with stage 10 before the week is up!

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Creative Lab: Curious - Freedom & Control, by Martins Baumanis

Creative Lab is a a dedicated experimental space within our course. It brings together a highly diverse selection of artists and lets them be in the same space for 3 hours every week. It is a place where expiration and inspiration happens at the same time – somebody expires an idea and then we all get inspired by the sheer magnitude of possibilities that 10 completely different artists can interpret each other's ideas.

 Voice, Didgeridoo, The Oud, Double bass, Percussion, Trumpet, Keyboard, Spoken word, Flute - all became just a starting point, we were moving beyond musical expression. We also put our different backgrounds to a test – rather than to stick to our guns, we were decisively open to adapt our practice and enquire deeper into it through meaningful collaboration.

 Even before the announcement of the theme for the Curious gig event on Wednesday 6 July, our group naturally gravitated towards exploring different roles and intentions when creating an artwork. Our experiments included changing our artistic roles throughout a process, following a fixed instructions. e.g. Director to Performer to Critic to Audience. We also devised different stages of improvising e.g. 4th stage would mean not listening to oneself and others, 3rd stage would mean listening only to oneself, but not changing what one plays, 2nd stage would mean listening and extracting what one likes, and 1st stage would mean listening and responding to others. This generated fruitful questions and made us aware of the subtleties and hierarchies when making an art piece.

 Step by step we narrowed our search for materials and processes and focused on the notion of freedom and control, following a prison metaphor and tried to figure out what are the crucial controlling things in performance, and how to show the contrast of freedom against it. That's all we will explain. To hear the final product of our extensive processes, we urge you to attend this year's Curious festival.

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS CURIOUS, Part 2 - BY RODRIGO VITERBO, MMus LEADERSHIP YEAR 1 STUDENT

Two weeks only for the big day! On the 4th of July we are presenting our pieces created over the last weeks. This has been an incredible process and a strong learning curve for all of us. In our group things are still not moving as fast as we would like. Picking from Kate’s last post, “11 Steps to A Collaboration” I find us in step 5. This can be scary from one side but from the other it makes us think more deeply about collaborative work and ways of coming together as artists from different art forms.

 As an instrumentalist I’m quite used to enter the room, have a discussion and go straight into testing things, providing sounds and notes for the group discussion. Because of how easy it is to get back to that material, by simply playing it again, I’m not so afraid of editing it or deleting if it proves not to be what’s needed. Both Nicolee, our visual artist, and Simon, the electronic musician rely on technology to create material and that technology has a set up time, choices to be made in terms of what software to use, the time to load and export material recently created. We find ourselves learning how to manage these differences in working whilst dealing with other calendars and deadlines.

 Sometimes it feels like a journey through darkness but hey, isn’t exactly that what our brief is about? Journeys, vastness, uncertainty and awe!

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS CURIOUS, Part 2 - BY KATE SMITH, MMus LEADERSHIP YEAR 1 STUDENT

Here we are diving into the second month of our work for the Curious Festival and the big day looms two weeks away. I’m starting to get both excited and nervous. While there is still so much to be done to realize our ideas, by now I have a good sense of the arc of the process of collaborating.

11 Steps to A Collaboration

Step 1: getting to know each other

Step 2: stumble through initial experiments

Step 3: woah ,this is awesome!

Step 4: take a break

Step 5: return, what were we even doing in the first place, who are you again?

Step 6: start to narrow focus, revisit best bits of previous work

Step 7: become overwhelmed by the pressure of creating something awesome – talk too much

Step 8: make a choice to make something

Step 9: pull together the bits – Frankenstein moment

Step 10: oh no! we need to rethink everything

Step 11: no more time for edits – perform it!

 I’d say that Taka and I have made it to Step 7 so far. As we push forward into Step 8, I can see how instrumental the past two months of experiments have been in helping me slowly test out new roles; for instance, I’ve begun working with sound editing software and composing for multiple voices. Likewise, I think Taka has enjoyed trying his hand at contributing to the sound – I’ll be using recordings of his voice in the final project! Of course, the crunch is yet to come, and surely our collaboration as well as our individual mettle will be tested. Regardless, at this point I’m just excited to start committing to our choices and looking forward to seeing our vision come to life!

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS CURIOUS - BY KATE SMITH, MMus LEADERSHIP YEAR 1 STUDENT

One of the appealing features of the Masters in Leadership is to create new work collaboratively across disciplines. As a primarily performing artist (I’m a classical vocalist) I was eager to gather new ways for developing my own work, in order to explore my personal creative voice. For the Curious Festival, each musician has been teamed up with an artist from Central Saint Martins, and encouraged to go out and make! Essentially, it’s a forum for exercising, testing, and manifesting many of the lessons and ideas we’ve encountered throughout this first year on the course.

I’ve been teamed up with a really talented young artist, Taka Hata. As we learned quickly from our first meetings, we are both workaholics passionate about our ideas, but also just as eager to adapt, play, and revise. I think we were both thrilled by the brief, a call to explore the universe as inspired by the poem by Rebecca Elson, “We Are Astronomers”. I was actually hoping to do something related to science, and upon receiving the brief, immediately thought of a million articles, podcasts, and ideas to share.

Taka and I began working on two concepts, density and time, but have since decided to focus on the subjective human perception/experience of time. Early on, we discussed our goals and preferences for the collaboration, among those: we are interested in creating a live piece, we are not interested in obscure meanings, we want the music and visuals to derive from and because of one another. Of course, we are learning that the most fruitful way to reach such lofty goals is to start small, and to follow the track of an idea from experiment to experiment. I am coming to appreciate how profound art can spring from fairly simple foundations. However, we are mindful of jumping to conclusions and deciding too early on what our final “product” will be. At this stage, the tutors are encouraging us to remain open to what may arise during the process of exploration and, indeed, I’m very excited to see where it will take us!

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Rebecca Elson ‘We Astronomers’

We astronomers are nomads, Merchants, circus people, All the earth our tent. We are industrious. We breed enthusiasms, Honour our responsibility to awe.

But the universe has moved a long way off. Sometimes, I confess, Starlight seems too sharp,

And like the moon I bend my face to the ground, To the small patch where each foot falls,

Before it falls, And I forget to ask questions, And only count things.

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS CURIOUS - BY RODRIGO VITERBO, MMus LEADERSHIP YEAR 1 STUDENT

Musicians, Visual Artists, Electronic Music and Composers. What an interesting mixture of crafts and experiences. This has been very present in this years’ edition of Curious.

We share a brief, we share the expectation for the Festival and we share that common goal, but we are all so different and diverse. We all have different ways of working and approaching work and that has been one of the main areas of learning in this collaboration.

How do we start creative work in a group formed by an electronic musician, a visual artist and a didgeridoo player? How relevant is it to share a specific sound of the didgeridoo and see how the visuals respond to that and how the sound manipulation interacts with everything?

There is also a different pace of material development, we find ourselves giving more time to the material to develop, almost as if we could play with it for more time. 30 seconds of video turn into 3 minutes of sound experimentation and it feels rewarding to be immersed in this process.

There is still a lot to go and to happen! We look forward to seeing where this is all going to take us...

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THE MESSENGERS - A POINT OF VIEW by Guy Wood, Co–Leader & Drummer

The Messengers is a unique band made from the gathering of some of London’s most creative and passionate musicians. The music we have made over our four--‐year journey constantly challenges the borders of style and convention. It is created, debated, rehearsed and performed as one family, And this unity transcends to the audience. As a drummer, the project extends my ability to integrate with a large ensemble and pushes me to facilitate a rhythmic framework open to the most virtuosic guitarist and to the debut tambourine player!

This band has had a huge impact on the way I perceive my own music making both in stylistic inspiration and new influence from the global music we research and within its societal context.

The Messengers has a unique place in society that brings together the audience and performer together in a high quality creative endeavour that creates a huge pride for all that become involved. It has helped me see my community through more open eyes and reinforces the importance of shared creativity and invention in today’s world.