A Summer of Practice

 Welcome! or Welcome back! As we head into autumn and the leaves fall off metaphorical and literal trees it is a great time to reflect on the old and and begin to grow the new! For creatives we are slowly being allowed with the easing of restrictions to return to performing practice, in many cases with precautions in place, but the feeling of being able to perform has for me been quite cathartic and rejuvenating. The group I perform with Me & My Friends have played several festivals this year, each of which being a valuable experience. 

The first festival we did, Camp Kin, was a chance to perform line the music we had made in lockdown live for the first time. It was interesting seeing which live arrangements resonated with a festival audience and which didn't and seeing audiences relearn their role in the transaction of performance starting a bit wary and nervous to dancing by the end of the set. It felt as performers we had to give them permissions to dance and become involved and bring them into the empty space in front of the stage, it was fascinating to see them relearn how to have such experiences. See a short clip of that performance here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CSeCvgTC8kc/ 

The second gig we did was at the Landworkers Alliance skills festival which was a weekend of workshops about sustainable agriculture with music thrown in. We arrived on a Sunday which is always a tough day to play as many people have checked out and ready to go home but his crowd had a relaxed desire to embody the music in any way possible. Before we played a Celidh band were performing and calling out set dances then they had a festival closing ceremony which bizarrely involved burning a wicker statue whilst people did random dancing around it, so they were already warmed up. Noticing this we adapted our set to what we call a 'bangers set' with all high energy tunes, this paid off with audiences dancing as can be seen here. We also played on a specially adapted truck that folded out into a stage which was a really cool concept. 

The final festival we did was at Purbeck Valley Folk festival, the big learning curb from this experience was the importance of preparation for sound tech. At the two previous festivals we had as long as we liked to sound check, get PA and monitor levels but at this festival we only had 30 mins which is not a lot of time at all especially when you have temperamental instrument mics for clarinet and cello. Throughout the set the sound kept cutting out in monitors and we lost cello sound front of house throughout causing the sound engineer to run on stage and switch cables. This can be really dejecting as a performer when it isn't going well! It was interesting to see how the band individually responded to the moment with some telling jokes, some acknowledging the issue and waiting for its resolution. It made me consider coping strategies around technical issues. They were eventually resolved to a passable level where we could play a bonanza of 6 high tempo songs in a row winning the crowd over but I couldn't help but feel disappointed with the performance and the lack of technical checks offered. As it wasn't great we didn't take any video on stage. 

Finding My Perspective and Voice through Literature Reviews

One of the most difficult things in research is finding your research territory to plant a flag in and claim it. It can be challenging sometimes to find an original perspective on issues many people have written about and there's no real set formula on how to contend with this. This is why a literature review becomes a friend and a tool to do this!

Literature reviews are the chance to check what's out there, acknowledge who has come before you and work out where your place is in your field. In a literature review you can really get to grips with what has been written and find those academic on your team agreeing with your perspective and those to argue with and feel challenged to disprove. It is a weird ritual we academic go through but by running the gauntlet of a literature review can show that our ideas can stand up against other scholarly work. 

It can sometimes be difficult as practitioners to realise the value of engaging with academic literature and what it can add to our work, but what academics often can do is to observe the things that are so habitual to our own practice we hardly we are doing them constantly. Many artistic practices have been observed by researchers and given names to things we have done every day in our performance space. As it is often difficult to step out of our own practice and reflect on it these scholars are a good place to start such an introspective conversation. 

Literature can also create frameworks and approaches for us to do research. Scholars have written about how to do good interviews and ask the right kind of questions, others on how to create an unbiased environment of observation and others how to quantify the scale of what we get up to. 

This week I've been talk to a lot of students on module two about the literature review exercise and why we do them. So wanted to share these thoughts on how it is a tool to help you begin to reflect on your own practice and to step out of it to find new perspective in what for you is day to day activity. 

When you start to pull together a literature review really explore what a source can do for your thinking and self-reflection and use it to feel out a methodology that will allow you to explore ideas situated in your practice. 

Building Communities of Musical Practice in Portland

 

The PDX Music Scene Project Panels I chaired in 2014

This week I have spent a bit of time reflecting on my PhD research and looking at what parts of it could be something to share with you to imagine new perspectives on your practice be in performative, somatic or pedagogical. At the suggest of Helen and Adesola I thought I could talk about building communities of practice as both an act of collaboration as well as an act of sustainability. 

As I musician over time I have built communities of practice around me of people I would collaborate with for a variety of reasons. There are producers I go to if I want my music to sounds a certain way, people who's playing style I like to have on recordings and people I like to sit down and write with. I also socially have many practitioner friends who I know I can communicate with to exchange ideas, seek reassurance on my approaches and to help me step outside the box and innovate. This was something I never did consciously until I studied the music scene in Portland. Seeing how the musical communities in Portland would interact and resource music making to ensure its sustainability was fascinating to connect with. 

Across the city of Portland many kinds of musics are made from Bhangra and Filmi to Balkan Brass bands but only certain genres are successful around the world, most notably jazz and indie rock. As a researcher naturally I wanted to find out why and if it was to do with community structures. 

Jazz had been deep rooted in Portland, mostly because of the migration of African-American workers to work on grand infrastructure projects in the city. The city used to be spilling over with jazz clubs with whole quarters of venues. When I visited the city for fieldwork I could see jazz culture was well rooted with jazz venues, jam nights and also school education programmes specifically developing jazz talent. This led to the success of jazz artist Esperanza Spalding who had been through several jazz programmes for young people. Older successful artist would invest in young talent and pass on their skill to a new generation to ensure potential was fulfilled, many felt it their duty to do so to ensure jazz would carry on in the city. 

Indie rock has been a more recent phenomenon that was closely linked to the more recent cultivation of the city as a DIY kind of place. In Portland there are many makers working in different crafts, citizens will often bake their own bread, grow their own veg and live sustainable lifestyles that outsiders view as 'hipster'. This lifestyle enabled the music that came next with the sheer concentration of creativity feeding into a twee folksy image of the city often referred to as 'Portlandia'. Indie Musicians didn't so much create infrastructure as connecting pre-existing dots and repurposing spaces for their use. Suddenly record labels, record stores, recording studios, venues and festivals were more linked up around the genre. Indie rock from Portland became successful nation wide with people coming to the city to seek a 'Portland sound' bringing in new talent to reinforce and invest in the music. 

Jazz built the roots. Indie rock connected the dots. Hip Hop is the future. 

Whilst indie rock has maintained acclaim it has been Hip Hop that is on the ascent from remarkable circumstances. Hip Hop has faced institutional racism and oppression in the city, and in defiant response the hip-hop community have created their own infrastructure. If venues would book hip hop acts they build venues, if media won't write about them they create their own media and so on. There are film makers, record labels, producers all defying the systematic oppression to make Hip-Hop happen. This infrastructure is connected in a joint mission of defiance. Artists have thrived as a result and have grown success. 

So what can be taken from the lessons of Portland? How might you reflect on this for your own practice? 

The starting point is to take stock of the communities of practice built around you. Why are they there? How were they forged? Do they have a shared/vision and purpose?

Then consider how you can consciously be part of that community building can you share your practice with others? Can you resource your community of practice to keep it sustained? 

Suggested Reading: When reflecting on this I thought of Bourdieu's forms of capital particularly social capital and the idea of investing in connections as well as resourcing them you can check this out here. 

Hello I'm Dr Sam Murray and I'm looking forward to work with you all as part of the MA Professional Practice Programme. My background is in music as a performer/composer, activist and policy researcher. This first post is really to tell you a bit about me and my background which has brought me to be part of the staff for this programme. 

I have been performing and composing with the group Me & My Friends for over 10 years now and have released 3 albums with this group and have an EP and new album currently on the way, that we are developing at the moment. It has been interesting to compose and work on music through Zoom as all my bandmates are spread across London, Leeds and Bristol so we have massively adapted our group composition techniques. We also have done touring across the UK, France, Germany and Switzerland which has been a fascinating experience to step out of and observe with my researcher brain! 

I have been engaged in cultural activism probably for about 5 years now working on a variety of campaigns around musicians' rights, policy campaigns and campaigns like 'Cardiff without Culture'. I have advised the Culture, Welsh Language and Communications Committee of the Senedd in Wales on key reports about music education and the live industry across Wales. My activism has also led me to run international workshops on the concept of Artivism including workshops in Helsinki and Budapest where I have worked to teaching activists how to use music and other arts forms in campaigning. 

Both these experiences led me into research musical cultures and music policy. My PhD looked at the music scene in Portland, Oregon in the USA where I interviewed over 80 scene members to see how the city works to promote and protect music making. I captured my experience in a Tumblr blog. I also used to work at UK Music as a policy and research officer for a year helping research evidence on a variety of issues from the EU Copyright Directive to helping grassroots music venues get business rate reliefs, as well as research key reports for the organisations on the music cities of Manchester and Sheffield. I also  helped research their annual Music by Numbers report. 

I've also held research posts at Cardiff and Teesside Universities working on creative industry pilot projects connecting academics with practitioners to make new innovations in the creative sector. My favourite project I worked on was connecting a theatre company with computer scientists to explore how to democratise theatre culminating in The Multiverse Arcade project as part of the Great Exhibition of the North. 

It always feels a bit strange to share my career in a post like this but hopefully there will be things in this post you've had similar experiences with and I would love to hear the kinds of work you have been doing in your careers. I often find the creative sector to be an exciting place to work as it is always full of surprises and unexpected turns that make it incredibly vibrant!