Reaching beyond the University
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uth Hardie joined the Faculty as Music Outreach Officer in 2009 and, not long after, the Cambridge Music Education Outreach Group (CaMEO) was established. Through these initiatives the Faculty is seeking to make a positive impact on music and education beyond the University. With two clear strands of outreach activity, one focusing on local community engagement and the other on widening access to higher education, we are committed to sharing resources and expertise with the public while helping our students develop valuable skills and experience for their futures. The scope of our outreach work is already extensive and continues to develop, with 152 volunteers contributing more than 1,200 hours of time to CaMEO projects over the past 18 months alone. This year, our widening-access strand has given 150 Year 12 students the opportunity to experience life at Cambridge for themselves, with sample lectures delivered by our academic staff and practical sessions run by our undergraduates. One of our priorities has been to improve the guidance available to prospective students so they are well informed and prepared
for university life, regardless of background: we have provided extra help this year through an e-mentor scheme that links students in schools from all over the country with our own students. New opportunities for gifted and talented students in Years 9, 10 and 11, run in conjunction with our resident ensembles, have also been very successful. Britten Sinfonia has supported a masterclass for wind players, while Stephen Montague, New Music Associate at Kettle’s Yard, has put on two masterclasses for composers. Alongside these projects we have been running school information sessions, parent-and-teacher talks, a week-long residential summer school, and one-off experience days for particularly underrepresented groups, such as children in care and ethnic minority groups. All these events aim to give prospective students and their supporters clear information about Cambridge and an accurate impression of higher education more generally. It is our current students who are most involved in community engagement activities, and the strength of these projects is that they are driven by student interests and ideas. In Lent Term alone, the Opera Society embarked on an education project delivering opera
workshops to 60 secondary school pupils, culminating in a performance of The Marriage of Figaro; the Collegium Musicum delivered a workshop and an instrument show-and-tell session for primary school children and their families based on their performances of Bach’s B minor Mass; and the New Music Ensemble delivered interactive workshops focused on some of their concerts, along with question-and-answer sessions with their composers. Students have given regular performances in Addenbrooke’s and Fulbourn hospitals, and they have also helped run community workshop sessions and singing projects in local community centres, in out-of-school clubs and with elderly action groups. The highlights of the outreach programme over the last two years must be the projects run as part of the University Festivals. For the 2009 Festival of Ideas, CaMEO ran a touring Gamelan workshop bus: this delivered 31 workshops to 430 children over five days, as well as two traditional Javanese Wayangs (puppet theatre shows), one for schools and one for the public. And as part of the 2009 Science Festival, CaMEO and the Faculty’s Centre for Music and Science staged an interactive show called Good Vibrations: this 6
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explored the relationship between music and maths, and was so successful that it was repeated at this year’s Festival. In 2010 our projects were even more ambitious. The specially written Young Person’s Guide to Percussion, complete with narrator and chamber orchestra, was performed for 450 primary school children; a fugal mass for three choirs accompanied by two gamelan orchestras was performed alongside school compositions at King’s College Chapel to a sell-out audience; and Bonesong, an opera written by two of our most enthusiastic outreach students, was workshopped in schools around Cambridge and then performed in the basement of the University’s Museum of Zoology as part of an Electronic Opera Club night. These are examples of an inspirational new facet of the Faculty’s work, and with our students’ growing dedication and enthusiasm for outreach activities we are confident that bigger and better opportunities lie ahead. Images, left to right: Junk Music Workshop; B Minor Mass Workshop with the Collegium Musicum and Girton Glebe Primary School; Performing in Hospitals; Good Vibrations (Science Festival 2011); Carmen Elektra: Opera Underground (Festival of Ideas 2010) 7