More Music Morecambe
Andrew Schiavo
Twenty-five years ago Pete Moser founded More Music in the Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe as a hub for the then new concept of community music. But now he is stepping down as artistic director and CEO.
The community music world has grown in amazing ways over the past 30 years, and the number of inspiring projects and musicians and research is world beating. There are huge projects that are making strategic shifts for the whole music education world, and individuals just getting on with their own locally based projects. We are also at a point where the work we are doing in creating an inclusive offer is moving into the mainstream, and we have a huge opportunity nationally to change the whole world of music making for young people.
This building is fantastic playspace for all of our musicians and all the hundreds of people who come in every week. We started in a corner of the building and now run a venue with 8 different sized workshop spaces including a world class venue that seats 140. It is fully accessible and everyone who comes here says it is a great welcoming space. I am so proud of what we have been able to do here.
Having our own space means we can make so many things happen in a space that we have created and that is fit for purpose. A quality space that we control and in which we can model our values and vision. At the same time it enables us to go out to work with people where they are. The balance of the two aspects is vital.
We have built a broad base of funding from Arts Council England, Youth Music, Music Education Hubs, trusts and foundations, and earned income from box office, workshop subs, partnerships and commissions. This is how we survive. Recently we have been working to increase funding from the private and corporate sector with more sponsorship and personal donations. It is a good mix, and I am leaving More Music in a very healthy state.
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The aim of these events is to explore new genres of music and attract new audiences to the venues. A minimum of 30% of the shows will feature artists with disabilities. These shows will also give aspiring sound and lighting engineers the opportunity to gain valuable experience working these shows under the supervision of technical officers.
The Grassroots project is funded by Arts Council England, and we will be working with More Music, Morecambe's Music and Education Charity, Lancaster and Morecambe College, Next Stage Network, and Lancaster Music Festival.
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In the summer of 2016 we wrote an album of new songs with Travellers living in and around Morecambe. The songs grew out of conversations over cups of tea and a series of outdoor sessions in a tent at the Mellishaw Lane site. They tell stories about the local characters as well as touching on issues that will be familiar to many people.
The chorus of this song about moving schools was written by musician Leroy Lupton, one of the More Music musicians working on the project and from a local Traveller family. His mother, Catherine, has been taking us to visit families as she tells us stories about her life and her thoughts about living as a traveller in the modern age. For me, as a songwriter and community musician, it has been a great journey and an insight into this a unique community, its traditions and how people adapt to change. One conversation turned into this power pop ballad
You can hear all the songs online at -music-in-morecambe/sets/traveller-tales or come to hear them performed in Morecambe on March 25th. The evening at the Hothouse will bring together the musicians from the project, with local young people and showcases the brilliant Bill Lloyd from Cumbria and the Simon Doyle Family band -tales.
It is the next stage of an adventure which also takes us into three Lancashire schools with high Traveller numbers where we will share our music and write new songs. Working for the Lancashire Music Education hub and in partnership with Eileen Mullervy from Lancashire GRT service the aim is to celebrate the community and support Traveller children in their learning and education.
For 30 years or more I have worked as a songwriter and community activist and I love the music I can make with people that helps to tell their stories. More Music is a community music charity based in Morecambe and working across the region connecting with people to make new music and celebrate creativity and imagination!
Written by George McKay and Ben Higham (2011). [From executive summary] The UK has been a pivotal national player within the development of community music practice. In the UK community music developed broadly from the 1960s and had a significant burgeoning period in the 1980s. Community music nationally and internationally has gone on to build a set of practices, a repertoire, an infrastructure of organisations, qualifications and career paths. There are elements of cultural and debatably pedagogic innovations in community music. These have to date only partly been articulated and historicised within academic research.
From the development of community music organisations in the 1980s to the more recent innovation of the Music Action Zones across the UK, from the relocation of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Salford and the efforts to adopt the Venezuelan el sistema model in England (In Harmony) and Scotland (Big Noise) today, or the rise of graduate courses in Community Music at UK HEIs, we can see an enormously energetic, and perhaps surprisingly sustained, effort at community arts provision in Britain, which also has an international dimension. The aim of this review is to chart the development and current state of community music as a leading contemporary creative and pedagogic practice whose express purpose is to be situated in the community, with reference to two other key questions.
Second it narrates the development of the More Music in Morecambe community music project through the 1990s, its successes and (mini-)crises, its beliefs and practices. It considers the origins of MMM in some of the earlier musical/theatrical performance practice of Welfare State International, and locates MMM in the context of the rise of community music as a social-cultural phenomenon in Britain. This involves discussion of ways in which the radicalism or idealism of some of early community music has been knocked and/or maintained.
Arriving in Morecambe in the early 1990s, I realised that I wanted to stop touring work. Here I found a great context in which to work. The town was a typical seaside casualty, suffering an economic downturn and huge social issues. I joined More Music as a musician-in-residence, and was soon joined by Kathryn MacDonald, whose passion for making change in communities has been an essential driving force for the charity.
I define myself as a community musician and a composer in the community. I have spent over 30 years making large-scale community music projects that include a range of musicians from beginners to professionals. I work with marginalised people and use my practice to give individuals new opportunities to progress, and help transform communities.
We shared a great love of humanity, as well as political anger and passion, and had great fun touring a show of songs and poems with his daughter, Sasha. We completed more than 50 shows over 12 years or more.
I had 12 brilliant years working with John Fox, Boris Howarth and many other inspiring theatre makers at Welfare State International. I started as a techie and went on to become musical director for projects in Japan and Tanzania, and across the UK.
I grew up with classical music all around me, and then in my teens discovered The Beatles, west coast bands, blues, John Renbourn and Pink Floyd. Following an overland trip to Nepal when I was 17, I decided to study music and went to Southampton University with a focus on composition.
In the final part of my blog about how we can support young people and their mental health through the arts, I discuss how we have begun to embed mental health champions into our young people's delivery team as well as proactively promoting the positive impact of engaging with the music projects we already offer.
Here at More Music, the crisis has become so apparent that we have created a mental health working group to ensure that as an organisation, our staff team are as equipt as possible to support both participants and ourselves in looking after our mental health and well being.
By virture of the fact that we work with over 100 young people each week and that the NHS mental heath task force reports that 1 in 10 children aged between 5 - 16 have a diagnosable problem, we are regularly coming into contact with young people experiencing mental health problems on some level. Be this a period of self harm, or depressive thoughts, low self esteem or social anxiety, the nature of our work, the safe, non judgemental environment and the relationships we build with young people lends itself to discussions about emotions and feeings. This makes us well placed for the early identification of mental health problems and we are often a point of first contact for young people who might need some emotional support. We work closely with other local organisations such as youth services and local schools and colleges to ensure that the support we offer participants is joined up and coherant, however, more and more we are recognising that we need specific training in order offer sufficent support to our participants. Just recently, it was noted in an evaluation, that we encounter more incidents needing mental health first aid than accidents during sessions.
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