The Pied Piper of Haydom

Lena Ward - Haydom Lutheran Hospital

 

It has been my great fortune to visit this hospital for a week every month for the last four months. Whilst Kirstein flies nurses and chanjo (vaccines) to remote villages in the area, I have been enjoying a kind of retreat; writing, researching and getting to know some of the people who are dedicating their time and expertise to this astonishing hospital. I was lucky enough to get a detailed tour of the hospital on my first visit, as it coincided with a visitor from a nearby health clinic who was eager to see if their patients could be referred here.

 

A friend suggested that I should take my violin to play for the patients, so on this last visit I managed to play for the children and their relatives. They have visiting hours between 2-4pm; the first afternoon I played in the main room where they have parties on weekends, and the second time I played in each room. A wonderful nurse called Sister Paulina was my escort to the different rooms and joined in singing with me as I played Swahili hymns and Christmas carols. It was great to hear relatives joining in (mostly the mamas) and clapping along.

 

There has been a lot of debate in the media recently about the well-intentioned Sir Bob and the re-release of 'Do they know its Christmas?' to raise money for the ebola crisis. It's hard to believe that the same tales of the woes of Africa are still being thrown out today - that the West hasn't moved on in their misconceptions and misjudgements after 30 years. Yes, the ebola crisis is horrific and requires external help, but it is only the crises that demand money that ever reach the wider attention of the West. I want to focus on the assets and the potential. The children and families in the Lena ward are receiving good care, they most definitely know it will soon be Christmas, and they most likely have a better idea of the true meaning of Christmas than their counterparts in the West. Mungu awabariki! 

 



Ignition!

I have just finished reading Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, and I was especially interested in his idea of there being, in the learning journey, points of igniting desire to commit to deep practice of skills – Coyle says that along with master coaching this leads to being an expert of whichever discipline is involved. This ignition could also be termed as intrinsic motivation. We used this term a lot in our discussions and writing during the Fellowship, but we didn’t have time to really unpack what it means.

Coyle cites the following factors as tinderboxes waiting to ignite a passion for ‘deep practice’:

1) Having an expectation and understanding of commitment involved: Gary McPherson studied students new to music in 1997:

“We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice. It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill”.

2) Role models

3) Sense of belonging to a group 

4) Sense of danger or lack of safety - dissatisfaction leads to efforts to change our situation or the pressure of impending accountability such as a concert or exam

5) Being the underdog

6) Praise of effort rather than achievement

Daniel Pink is his book Drive adds the following:

7) Autonomy – Being able to choose your own direction

8) Mastery – Satisfaction of getting better at something 

9) Purpose - this could be personal “I want to be the first person who goes to college in my family” or seeking a change in the lives of others “I empathise with this person’s situation and I want to do something to help”.

I’m writing this at a Lutheran missionary hospital in Tanzania. As the hospital approaches its 60^th anniversary, you can’t help but consider the ‘deep practice’ of Norwegian missionaries who built the best equipped hospital in the country, in the middle of the bush, surmounting cultural, logistical, geographical, financial and linguistic barriers, and who have sponsored children from primary school age to have them return to the hospital as surgeons. I’m not sure you could even grasp a sense of the commitment that would be needed from those early years to now, although there was and is a sense of danger in terms of providing decent medical services to a catchment area of 2 million people. It is their sense of purpose that has ignited their commitment and perseverance in this task.

I have one more point to add:

10) Personal relevancy – searching and learning about yourself leads to personal satisfaction, relaxation and often emotional and spiritual uplifting.

 

The El Sistema program in Venezuela has been able to create a culture that ignites many of the above:

1) Understanding of expectations - Students see the progression from paper violins to to youth orchestra level in the nucleo and the daily commitment to the program.

2) Role models - Along with the inspiring figure of Dr Abreu, Dudamel is the hero of many musicians in Venezuela.

3) Sense of belonging - Students go through their years in the nucleo belonging to the ensemble, and the Venezuela jacket is their uniform showing that they belong to a greater group of the Venezuelan people.

4) Sense of danger  - not just a feeling of unease on the streets of Caracas, but that the music education available to them at the nucleos is not found elsewhere and is therefore to be treasured and appreciated. Some facilities are barely suitable for their purpose but they soldier on regardless. Students are also prepared for a performance shortly after starting to play their instrument.

5) Underdog – Venezuela has no strong history of classical ensembles or a place in the classical world compared to the cultural bastions of Europe and the US.

6) Tochar y luchar – 'fight and play' rather than you’ve either got the X factor or not.

7) Autonomy - One aspect of motivation that El Sistema may not be encouraging; there doesn’t seem to be much choice of instrument and repertoire, and there is lack of opportunities to study other musical disciplines such as composition and improvisation. There also doesn’t seem to be much flexibility in terms of how much you want to commit to the program, the daily rigorous rehearsals and regular performances, and there is not uniform access to auditions, more advanced ensembles and touring opportunities throughout the country.

8) Mastery - Many El Sistema commentators remark on the sheer brilliance of students, the joy apparent in performances and how many hours they are willing to commit to practice. Being invited to take over the Salzburg Festival must say something about the excellence of the musicians in the program.

9) Purpose - The corporate mission that music belongs to the community and exists to serve others.

10) Personal relevancy - Eric Booth: "El Sistema conductors and teachers invest far more instructional time in describing sections in terms of stories, or giving visceral images for a note or a phrase, than do traditional conductors. This enables the musicians to make stronger emotional and physical connections to the music. This investment in emotional connection fuels the Sistema teaching truth that “passion provokes precision”—meaning that a young artist’s emotional investment leads to mastery more reliably over the long haul than technical drill; indeed, the hunger to express more fully drives the improvement and creates motivation for technical solutions more than compliance or a generalized hunger for improvement."

Maybe the fact that El Sistema reaches 9 out of 10 'ignition' points explains why so many people devote their time to the program, both in and out of Venezuela. 

Uraki Secondary School

Last week, I went to visit the music program at a government school on the other side of town. Uraki has had a link with Makumira University Music Department for two years now, and three students and an university tutor deliver classes there every other day. The school is a secondary school with students in Form I-IV and roughly ages 11 to 16 years. At the end of Form IV they take their O-Level exams, and like most secondary schools in Tanzania, there is no provision to progress to A-Level.

In fact, they are now in the midst of the end of year exams and many students were busy cleaning the classrooms ready for exam week, and even the District Educational Officer was visiting. She was especially interested in the science laboratory which had been equipped with donations from the UK, and another lab was also being constructed. As part of the Secondary Education Development Plan, the government has ordered that each secondary school build a laboratory, without providing the resources to do so.

We had a chat first with the Headmaster who is very eager to have musical provision in the school. The music students are hoping to give a music class for the teachers, but they had already left the school leaving just a few staff around including the Teacher On Duty who walks around with a stick!

The bell was rung for assembly, and all the students lined up in their separate forms with different colour jumpers for each form. I introduced myself and then the students were given the choice to clean or take part in a music activity. The session I saw was interesting - they didn't seem quite into learning new material at this point in the afternoon, and some just walked away. However, at the end, they sang a well-known song from their early music classes (see video above) and were having a great time.

In addition to the practical ensemble classes, the students are receiving music theory lessons which enables them to take the predominantly theoretical national exams in music (NECTA). Throughout the school, pass rates are very low, but they are started to excel in their music exams. The university tutor remarked that their goal is to show how music can change a school, and with the best pass marks in music, the students can begin to gain a sense of what they can achieve!

Music For One Foundation

A couple of months ago I met up with the second cohort of musicians from the South Korean organisation Music For One Foundation. The Foundation describes itself as "a performing arts-based humanitarian organisation dedicated to working with children and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential through music and music education". There are many programs that make up the organisation but volunteers Stacy, Kris and Chanmi are part of the Gift of Music Program which seeks to deliver music education to communities in less developed countries.

Their program has funding from the Korean government for three years and they are teaching at a university music department, a Lutheran Bible school and a children's centre with 300 primary aged children. Let's hope it can continue!

 

SFRC Reception

The next two years on the Sistema journey! The formal transition of the Sistema Fellows Program to the Sistema Fellows Resource Center occurred yesterday at the New England Conservatory. I so look forward to joining my fellow alumni making music with youth across the world when my project starts soon...

Go to this link to find the final report on the Sistema Fellows Program:
http://necmusic.edu/sistema

Marching off the map

At a sermon at my church in Arusha, a Lutheran pastor told us this story: When a battalion of Roman soldiers were about to march into territory that hadn’t been recorded yet, they sent a messenger back to Rome to report that they were about to march off the map. At the moment, in the midst of planning, conceptualising and researching, I feel a lot like these soldiers - and I’m also looking out for a battalion to join me!

A lot of what I aim to do has definitely already been charted, or is in the early sketches; a music project using traditional music, an El Sistema-inspired program, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary performances, community engagement across cultural and linguistic boundaries. However, there is a long way to go for these landscapes to be fully explored.

For example, Sistema-inspired programs are mostly using classical and western folk music and without much consideration of the students’ and community’s cultural background. The traditional ensemble set-ups of the orchestra and choir are used as paradigms for teamwork, co-operation and the cultivation of empathy – Daniel Barenboim’s “template for democracy”. There are few models of using other genres of music in intensive programming for social outcomes. Likewise, they all offer free music instruction and so rely on tempting donors with easy-on-the-eye statistics about the grade improvements of students involved in their programs. There is a desperate need for these programs to develop some sort of self-sustainability and to advocate for more community responsibility for the program, and especially for the programs in the context of developing countries.

In the West, we have an obsession with specialisation, becoming an expert in one skill or field. This has resulted in the delineation of a myriad of genres and styles of art, and an ensuing hierarchy, so that ‘crossover’ between different genres of music is generally not encouraged. In the world of education, examination boards create qualifications that put up barriers between rigidly defined artistic expressions, although this is starting to change with newer multi-disciplinary qualifications such as BTEC gaining as much credibility as the A-Level. If cross-pollination between different genres of one art-form is rare, consider how infrequently cross-arts exhibits or performances are supported in schools. By contrast, in Kiswahili there is one word for a community performance of various musical expressions ‘ngoma’, and one word for the arts ‘sanaa’.

Another landscape that I really get excited about exploring is that of the artistic performance experience. Being trained in the world of classical music, I have a set of rituals and etiquette wired into my performing system. In our contemporary urban societies, however, we consume culture and the arts at a fast pace with multi-sensory experiences and interactions that are incompatible with the concert hall culture. So what can these new culturally and community relevant performances look like?  

One landscape that gives me a headache thinking about is that of how to evaluate artistic quality. For many in the mainstream music world, quality means a high level of individual proficiency on an instrument, such as a prodigious display on the violin or piano, or an ensemble executing a complex technical piece. For others it means a close imitation of recorded artists; their sound and style of musical expression, their arrangement of a known song. These criteria for quality reflect the individual and isolated life of a musician seeking a place in a competitive performance world. This lens would not be appropriate for assessing the quality of a master drummer leading a drumming workshop at a community venue, or the performance of a traditional dance troupe.

Lastly, there is the balance and synergy of artistic and social aims in community music programs. Social change through music can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Two versions that I have been considering involve using music as a support for educational attainment or learning outcomes, and for community-building or strengthening social cohesion. For the first version, Sistema-inspired programs are beginning to accumulate data about how intensive music programs affect achievement at school and there is a growing pile of awesome brain science as to how the process of learning music supports other learning. The field of community music and El Sistema in Venezuela answers to the second version, but where does the artist focus on the quality of the artistic product and where do they focus on the quality of community engagement and social impact?

Peter Renshaw has this to say about one music program in the UK: “But the work of Music in Prisons also has a social aim – basically, to stop people re-offending. Music is then seen as a vehicle for achieving social ends – but the music leader is not an artistic ‘social worker’ or therapist”. In other words, musicians can and should find a place for themselves in community contexts but remember that they are first and foremost musicians. At a workshop the Fellows attended at Dreamyard in the Bronx, NYC, one teaching artist talked about how the arts succeeds in bringing the community together and strengthening bonds so there is more potential for community support. This view sees the arts as establishing and supporting bridges between community members.

So not only should we march off the map and explore new territory, but we should use our artistic expertise to build foundations and use the materials available in the community to construct bridges. What this will look like is waiting to be discovered.

The Simon Bolivar Project

The Simon Bolivar Project in essence is to expand the El Sistema program to reach 1 million students by the year 2019. As noted in various articles (http://nsnbc.me/2013/05/23/venezuela-to-expand-its-el-sistema-music-program/) the project will be funded by the President's Office. 

Roderigo gave us more information about the methods being used to reach the goal of 1 million:

·         El Sistema will continue to lobby community leaders to get permission to start programs, and knock on doors in barrios to invite families to be involved. They receive continued requests from communities as well to have El Sistema work with their children.

·         The program will speed up its de-centralisation process in order to reach the required number of children. Currently audition opportunities, instruments and other resources are difficult to get outside Caracas, and there are not many opportunities to play in Caracas or tour nationally. There needs to be a stronger bridge between the two worlds of El Sistema – the ‘elite’ and ‘rural’ nucleos by supporting and mentoring teachers sent to rural nucleos.

·         El Sistema will build on the government-led Bolivarian school scheme as a way of working with the public schools and including them as part of the project. The school day usually ends at 1pm, but this is extended to 5pm so the schools essentially become nucleos. Parents already pay a lot for childcare during this time so this would also greatly benefit families. The scheme is 6 years old and currently involves art and sports activities. El Sistema was initially consulted by the government because of the organisation’s long experience dealing with large amounts of children in arts activities. There has been Presidential approval for El Sistema to take on this scheme as part of the project along with the access to funding, resources and facilities that are part of the scheme.

·         The program needs to triple the amount of staff (including allowing existing teachers to get certification) and to create foundations to allocate funds. Lots of institutional development needs to occur – there has been much expansion vertically but now El Sistema needs to expand its base to create opportunities for all regardless of location.

·         The Special Needs Department at Barquisimeto aims to create a pilot program in state schools and then replicate the model at other schools.

We heard lots of variance in numbers of how many students are currently in the program and how many each area was aiming to get on board. At some points it sounded like a race to get as many numbers in the program as possible, regardless of the quality of musical engagement. We talked we some nucleo directors about their strategy to reach this goal.

Jesus – Nucleo Director at Merida

Jesus is convinced that the project will be successful due to Dr Abreu’s visionary leadership; “There are those who doubt his huge plans but when you speak to him, he makes them sound plausible, he convinces people as a musician and an economist.” He pointed out the reputation and celebrity surrounding El Sistema, Dudamel and the program’s global renown; “Everyone wants to be part of El Sistema - the real revolution!”  Families are inspired by the achievements of their neighbours and they realise that background isn’t an issue. According to Jesus, this year the whole of El Sistema wants to recruit 120,000 more kids (he thinks a more realistic figure of how many in the program now is 390,000).

Merida’s strategy this year is to extend to six new schools and 6000 more students, which has been made more possible with the new cable car from the town centre to the barrios. It is impossible to expand the existing nucleos as they are already too full, so they will work with the schools first and then open another nucleo. They started in November 2013 with choir and recorders; students share instruments, there is a carousel of classes, and the program also sells violins to students (the cheapest are 5,000 Bolivares).They aim to present these new students’ performances and then get money for orchestral instruments from regional and local governments. Jesus spoke about issues with getting the directors at the state schools on board with the program, but not with the students and their parents. They eventually want to get 20,000 children in the whole state involved.

Victor – Nucleo Director in Ejido, Merida State

Victor worked in the nucleo development office in Caracas. His area goal for 2019 is to expand the number of children served from 487 to 3325. Within four days, they set up 25 small music centres of 1,300 students in the barrios in the area (modulos) with only one teacher for singing, cuatro and theory. An issue is to get motivated teachers for the modulos who are willing to adapt to the school environment and the facilities available. When asked about the pace of the project, he replied; “It’s going quickly because it is working! When a Venezuelan has an idea, you just do it.”

From his experience in Caracas, he told us how the culture of the new students is the most challenging aspect of nucleo development, as they come from very difficult and dangerous backgrounds. He was involved in going from house to house with teachers to invite people to the project. They even talked to the ‘mafia’ about bringing culture to the barrios, and persuaded them to leave the program alone and protect them.

It will be interesting to see how the dynamics of the El Sistema program adapt to working in schools, considering that many Sistema-inspired programs are in-school or after-school programs. The success of this project will undoubtedly continue the program’s ever-increasing global influence.