6 minute read
Expanding Musical Horizons in Wales
Clare Stevens
Photo: Bruce Childs
ISM Council member Eugene Monteith tells Clare Stevens about two new projects that aim to expand the musical horizons of children and young people in Wales
Eugene Monteith has a rewarding salaried job as librarian of people that would be quite enough to occupy a working week, question’ in the May/June 2021 issue of Music Journal a keen interest in inspiring young people to get involved with music. Over the past couple of years he has devised and led two projects that have done just that, while providing opportunities for his colleagues at BBCNOW and other freelance musicians to carry on working during the pandemic and to establish links with their local communities.
Top: BBC NOW and Tredegar Band players Photo: Yusuf Bastawy Right: Eugene Monteith
Eugene Monteith
Sounds of Cricket
advantage of the one-to-one coaching sessions for the at its test match ground in Cardiff city centre, Sophia Gardens, which is not far from BBCNOW’s base at the Wales Millennium Centre.
‘It was late and I was helping the coach Ed pack up,’ Monteith recalls. ‘He was heading off to Colwyn Bay, North Wales to run some schools workshops, and it struck me “there’s a workshop here, something we can do as a national BBC orchestra and a national cricketing centre”. That got my brain turning.
of a score book and get a composer to translate the numbers into cells and rhythms and patterns, and use that as a starting point for some composition work with kids, but I couldn’t get my head round it, so I went back to the sound of cricket – what do you hear? Percussion – the ball hitting the pads or the bat … stumps falling – and a lot of singing. So there you are, there’s a body percussion and voice workshop, themed around cricket.’
Both the cricket club and the BBC NOW education team were interested in the concept and a pilot project was launched in January and February this year. Year 4 primary school children were invited to come along to Sophia Gardens, to meet Monteith and some orchestral players for a fairly simple music workshop, while the cricketing sounds were still fresh in their minds. At the next session they were given a quick introduction to four brass instruments – the trumpet, trombone, French horn and tuba – learned some basic clapping and singing rhythms and heard a brass quintet and percussionist play Monteith’s arrangement of a medley of cricketthemed tunes such as the ‘Soul-Song Limbo’ used by the BBC for Test singing ‘I don’t like cricket, I love it!’
‘One of the players came up to me afterwards and said, “this is great”, because at school he was a keen rugby player and always felt he had to choose between sport and music,’ says Monteith, who had a similar experience as a talented schoolboy cricketer. ‘It was good to show these children that maybe you don’t have to choose, here you are in the cathedral of Welsh sport and you’re getting music lessons, and the skills and discipline you need for sport and music are the same.
He acknowledges there was a lot in the introductory sessions for the children to take in, especially as many of them were just as unfamiliar with cricket as they were with music, but the aim is to make this a legacy project,
building on their experience over two years. They will create and record their own cricket-inspired music, perform it in school and then see it broadcast on a big screen at Sophia Gardens in a family cricket day that will also include try-an-instrument sessions and performances by BBCNOW players.
Brass bands in the valley
Eugene Monteith
Above: BBC NOW brass and Eugene Monteith Right: Iwan Xox, Beatrice Carey and Eugene Monteith The second of Monteith’s projects involves helping to support the work of Tredegar Band in rebuilding the brass banding tradition of the Welsh valleys. This year’s BBC Proms featured a substantial
Concerto Grosso for Brass Band and Orchestra by BBCNOW’s current composer-in-residence Gavin Higgins, who previously held a similar post with Tredegar Band, hence their collaboration as the band featured in the Prom performance on 8 August. ‘Tredegar used to have a youth band,’ explains Monteith, ‘but they couldn’t keep it going when the pandemic hit. People in the valleys generally have struggled to keep children engaged with music. So we had planned to take the brass element of our cricket workshops and do something similar in Tredegar, but when the Welsh COVID-19 rules tightened again we had to very hastily rearrange it as an online workshop, broadcast on Zoom from Hoddinott Hall, where we now have all the necessary equipment, with a brass ten-piece, mainly BBC musicians but including four Tredegar players as well.
‘We put out a call to schools and had an amazing response – we reached 3,200 children across Wales, which obviously made far more impact than our original project would have done. It showed us that we can deliver for a happening anyway, but the pandemic has accelerated the process. afterwards from schools saying their students really wanted to learn to play brass instruments, and asking for advice, so the BBC has been able to put them in touch with community bands, teachers and music hubs and
we are thinking about how we can help to support that, perhaps with some sort of residency or masterclass series by BBCNOW players.
‘The Sound of Cricket project ties in well with the new Welsh national curriculum for music; this one is much simpler, it’s just about helping the community and getting kids to engage with music. But when I’m planning these activities I always remember visits by the Ulster Orchestra to my school. I was already hooked on music, but when I looked up and saw these people making a living from it, I thought “that’s something I could do, there’s a world out there that I want to exist in.” It would be great if a child in one of our sessions felt the same.’
bbc.co.uk/bbcnow glamorgancricket.com tredegartownband.co.uk eugenemonteith.com
