Setting kindness to music
Our online summer project devised together with adults with learning disabilities
Members of LSO Create have always worked beyond notes on a page in the concert hall.
What is LSO Create?
LSO Create offers exciting opportunities for adults with learning disabilities, their supporters and carers to engage with the LSO as active music-makers and performers as well as audience members. United by a love of music, they meet every month to compose, improvise and create together as ‘Monday Club’.
However, as for so many people across the UK, Covid-19 forced some members of Monday Club to shield or stay at home alone. Unable to meet in the same room, LSO Discovery knew how important it was to quickly find another way to come together, finding connection through music while disconnected physically.
Setting up a 'lockdown' project
From the start of the lockdown period and still now, we've all felt that the need for kindness is greater than ever. Kindness. It seemed a good theme to focus our creative work on. We settled on 'Kindness Contagion'.
We asked LSO Create participants to send us images (like this one) that for them represented the idea of kindness. Their contributions covered a whole range of ideas – food, gifts and cards delivered to doorsteps for celebrations during lockdown, flowers, ambulances, tributes to the NHS, hugs with friends and family, artwork wishing passers-by to ‘stay safe’. These items, gestures and moments all symbolised kindness in different ways to different people.
Our Music Director Sir Simon Rattle joined in, recording a special message for the group with his own thoughts and feelings about the word…
'If you think of kindness as sharing and communication and simply making feelings, then this might be one of the best definitions of music.'
We grouped our images into three separate categories…
1. People (Alone, Hugging, Loving)
2. Pandemic
3. Nature
… and stitched them together into a film. Animateur Mark Withers sketched a rough structure for a new piece of music, and so from three categories came three movements!
With plans (and a piece) beginning to take shape, we met on Zoom for the first time in lockdown as one big group of LSO Create participants and the LSO team. In a chatty and emotional reunion, we agreed the plan for the coming weeks.
'It was lovely to see everybody and for C to realise that those people were still there. For people like C, his world shrank completely when lockdown happened and his ability to interact socially was very much reduced.'
'I saw all of my friends today!'
So what was the plan?
Each member of the group was paired with an LSO musician, with whom they would connect every other week to talk, listen and play together, either by Zoom or over the phone. The task: to create music that represented the images of kindness in the film.
Where participants had their own instruments (and once they'd got over the hurdle of virtual tuning!), the pair would play together and record sections of music. A slight time delay meant that the duo couldn't play exactly in time, but a musical question and answer approach worked well. There were even experiments with pulse, with one half of the pair playing a free accompaniment without a time signature, and the other playing over the top.
For certain sections of the music, recordings were passed around the group, so each pair was responding to and building on what had previously been created by their friends. One of our piano-playing members even created some ‘interludes’ or linking sections between the movements of the piece.
'It’s been the highlight of the lockdown … something to look forward to, and after each session he remained in such high spirits for the rest of the day!'
If participants didn’t have their own instruments, they could simply sit back and listen, or channel their inner-Rattle. Using a hand signalling technique, they could direct the LSO musicians, showing dynamics, note range, length, tempo and articulation. One participant described his signalling as a ‘magic spell’!
LSO players often brought repertoire along to their sessions that was bespoke to the likes of the LSO Create member they were paired with. In one case, a motif learnt together became a constant refrain throughout the sessions and a way to focus attention. Occasionally participants would return to their next session having themselves composed a new motif in response to a discussion they'd had as part of the Kindness Contagion project!
'It renewed my energy each fortnight and gave me lots to think about and reflect on. We all know how music and the arts in general can make such a difference to our lives, but this project highlighted exactly what is so wonderful about making and sharing music and exploring ideas and feelings through music, when they might not be so easily expressed in other ways.'
'An amazing project that I feel everyone should know about. It shows what can be done to include, stimulate and involve a very vulnerable and socially isolated group of people during lockdown where their world basically collapsed around them.'
Beyond the music
Each session was different: some duos played together for 30 minutes, others devised intricate narratives for the music, and a few participants chose to curate a private LSO recital each week!
But whatever happened in each session, kindness remained the overarching theme – strong relationships started to form between players and participants, and there was no denying the profound sense of connection and togetherness the project had created.
'It was so much more than I expected. It brightened up T's time and was done with such care, kindness and thoughtfulness. T was totally delighted with it. He loved the individual sessions so much. He loved saying to his brothers that he was having music lessons just like them.'
'I was home alone in London. In a time that everything in the life of musicians stopped, this project made me feel I was still 'of use' and part of something important.'
Working in this way brought a huge number of benefits. As a result of this very unexpected and last minute programme redesign, we may actually change how some things are done. The ability to focus 1:1 allowed the quieter members of the group to grow in confidence, either verbally or musically. Plus the focus of the sessions was bespoke to each participant – something that is never possible when we meet as a group of 50 in the Jerwood Hall.
'When circumstances make it impossible for interactive music making to take place ‘in the room’ – as now, or in the future for housebound participants – the power of music and connection can still transcend. Maybe remote projects, or remote interaction, may in part stay with us to extend our LSO Discovery and Create footprint.'
Final editing and world premiere
Once the players and participants had recorded what they had made, Chris in our Discovery Digital team pieced it all together in collaboration with animateur Mark to make the final piece.
We met for our tea-party premiere screening in July – the final session of the term – to reflect on the project and show the film for the first time. But what was the reaction?
'It brought hope and the chance of expression through music during very difficult times that have been very hard to tolerate or make sense of. I was impressed by the amazing pieces of music composed as a result.'
'For the Create members, the project seemed to give a place of familiarity, a reference of normal life and of time passing, a chance to excel, a chance to interact, an environment to be musicians once again.'
See the end result for yourself …
You might also like
- Find out more about LSO Discovery and LSO Create on our website
- Read about how we took our Discovery work for under 5s online this summer on our blog.
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