Music Making Across Boarders - Let's Teach What Matters

Just over two years ago, we performed and produced this Zulu folk song across 3 Catholic Schools in Western Sydney with a small community school in the area of Ngong (Nairobi) in Kenya.

I was reminded of this project recently when some colleagues asked me "What app do you use to make a video like this?"?They looked puzzled when I told them?"There is no App to make a video like this?"?That is when I realised that the BIG point about this project is the "WHY" - integrated learning - soft skills - what I keep hearing various people in leadership referring to as "21st Century Skills" and to quote our own Bishop Vincent?"Let's then especially never forget we must be on the 'lookout' for the marginalised and those on the edges, so that our young people are taught to value what really matters".?Our students need to learn to build relationships within their own communities, across communities and across cultures to realise that we can all learn from each other.

If you would like to undertake a project like this and want more details on the technical, production or musical arrangement, please feel free to put a comment or contact me directly - I'm happy to have a conversation.

I'll explain this in 3 steps:

1. You need to build the relationships:

with school leadership, class teachers and of course - the students. At the time of this project, I was "Music Coordinator Multi-Campus" across these 3 Catholic Schools, so coordinating the project was made a bit easier, but I still had to work with my team in each school and the leadership in each school - the challenge there was to communicate to the school communities the "Why" of this project - our own learning AND sharing the learning with the students and teachers in Kenya.

Interestingly, Alfred (The Director of Brightshiners School) and his staff really got the "Why" of the project right from the beginning.?Read this blog post to see how I built the relationship with the school in Kenya

Do NOT start the relationship with a school in Africa or anywhere else in the world with the idea that you are better than them or that you are going to just "help them".?Be prepared for you and your students to learn as much from them as they learn from you. You need to be prepared to be "Learning Partners".

2. If possible - make the music making and production a part of the learning.

Also - integrate the learning.?I really believe that a project like this - especially when in collaboration at an international level across cultures - can be a great Integrated learning project; geography, sociology, languages - and THEN the music making. You can incorporate into a music topic from the syllabus such as "music of another culture".

You can cover musical concepts and elements such as "Chord Structure" "Scales & Modes" "Rhythm - Polyrhythm" etc but also work across faculties - Visual Arts, Social Science (HSIE) Languages and if you have a music production course or VET entertainment - then those students could problem solve the issues of location recording, synchronisation, mixing, mastering, then video editing of such a large scale multi-campus production. See step 3.

3. Post and Pre Production:

I was going to call this step just "post Production" and then I thought back to that question from my colleagues?"What app did you use to make this?"?and then I realised that I was already aware at the start of the project that we needed to prepare - not just by teaching the various components of the song in each school BUT also arranging and producing the "Sync Track" that each school ensemble/choir performs to. This is a very important step that most people asking this question do not realise. THEN..... when you have all the components - video, audio recordings etc from each school/ensemble/choir, you need to first of all mix all the audio components together to produce a "Master Track". If you have made a really good "Sync Track" in the first place, then this is the audio 'glue' that holds all the other components together - if the performers in each school/campus have not recorded accurately, or you don't have a good quality rock solid 'Sync Track' then there is absolutely no 'app' that will pull it together - so careful preparation is the key.

Ideally, this would all be great learning for a music production class or in NSW a VET entertainment class - to problem solve the issues of recording and production across communities. However, as one of my schools was a primary school and the other 2 schools were fairly new (Santa Sophia was still on a temporary site) I had to do a lot of the technical preparation and post production myself. In future, I would try to make a project like this more student centred by making both the musical component and the production component each a separate Project Based Learning task with the teams working together.

This video shows the "Making of The Lion Sleeps Tonight" with the pre and post production done mainly by myself in my own project studio

Now..... let's revisit that question: What App did you use to make this video?

That is the question that made me realise that we have to consider the WHY of this project; What are we learning? What problems are we trying to solve? before we can begin.

I'm sorry that I can't just recommend an app. It is a combination of skills - relationship building, collaboration, problem solving PLUS the use of good recording microphones and cameras and recording/production hardware and software in the studio - then the video is edited as a final step with the master audio track - which I finalised in iMovie.

Lastly - what the students learned the BIG WHY of the project; let's revisit Bishop Vincent's wise words........"So that our young people are taught to value what really matters"