Primary Music Magazine
Issue 1.0 Spring 2018
Our Changing
World…
Mike Simpson, Musical Director & co-‐founder of Inspire-‐works discusses how whole-‐class music making in primary schools has changed over the past 15 years, and explores whether world-‐ music should remain a part of it. @inspireworksuk
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“Let’s give up our jobs! Let’s travel to somewhere in the world where music, dance and drama are closely linked. Let’s stay as long as we can afford, learn as much as we can, buy as many authentic resources as we can and then teach everything we’ve learnt in workshops in the UK.” That is what my wife, Jacqui, said when she came home from work one day in the summer of 2002. Jacqui was then the Head of Drama in a school in Surrey and I was mainly forging an income from peripatetic drum kit/percussion teaching and leading a few African drumming workshops. We settled on travelling to Bali in Indonesia and were able to stay there for a year, living with a local family. We fell on our feet with my gamelan teacher being a prince in the royal family, Jacqui’s dance teacher being one of the most respected on the island and having shadow puppetry lessons with a leading shadow puppeteer. We commissioned our own 30-‐player set of gamelan instruments to be built and ended up needing to book a 40ft shipping container to bring everything back to the UK! It was all such a great idea, but would it work? Would schools book us to do workshops? Thankfully, our Indonesian arts workshops were an instant hit and we were very fortunate that whole-‐class instrumental learning was very much in its infancy so what we were doing was very new and suited the educational landscape at the time. We quickly expanded into other world-‐music genres, and in 2014 we partnered with the charity Street Child United to deliver two projects that led to us achieving the Guinness World Records for the largest samba band and the largest drumming lesson! These two projects remain the only world-‐music projects nominated as finalists in the history of the Music Teacher Awards.
