Twenty National Youth Folk Ensemble members met online each day from 4-9 April 2020 to take part in activities with the Ensemble’s Artistic Director Sam Partridge; tutors Laura-Beth Salter, Dave Gray, Sam Sweeney, Becky Price and Rob Harbron; and pastoral staff Jack Healy and Natalie Reid. We bookended the week with a group play-along to live recordings from the Ensemble’s recent Liverpool Philharmonic performance and we met every morning on Zoom for group warm-ups and to set creative tasks for the day. Read more about what took place below…
Music Lessons and Workshops
We saw the week as an opportunity to focus on individual skills development, so each member benefitted from one-to-one tuition and sectional workshops on Zoom. They also worked through pre-recorded workshop videos in their own time, which had been created by Sam Sweeney, Laura-Beth Salter and Dave Gray.
Creative Collaboration and Music Technology
The Ensemble was introduced to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library digital archive and encouraged to uncover and interpret tunes from the Historic Dance and Tune Books. Rob Harbron taught the young musicians how to record, edit and mix music in music technology programme BandLab. The Ensemble then collaborated in small groups to share ideas, arrange their tunes and record their parts into BandLab, resulting in four new pieces which we hope to expand to the full Ensemble in the summer.
Extra activities
We were fortunate to have our pastoral team with us all week to check in with each young musician and provide extra activities, such as clog dancing and nature art, to get us all moving around and away from our screens! Our photographer, Camilla Greenwell, gave a talk on how musicians can prepare for a photoshoot and shared images from her recent work on folk album covers. Evening social activities included Sam Sweeney’s music quiz and our popular Listening Club where everyone brings a track to share for communal listening. We all enjoyed ‘Meet the Tutor’, where the tutors played tracks from their own albums, talked about their careers in music, and answered questions from the Ensemble members.
Thanks very much indeed for all the incredibly hard work the National Youth Folk Ensemble team must have put in to prepare for last week's remote residential at such short notice. [My daughter] had an inspiring and really fun week, and says she learnt a huge amount. It gave her such a boost in the middle of all the current difficulties. – Parent
It's been really amazing, I'm so glad and frankly impressed that you all managed to put this together, and I'm very grateful. – Ensemble member
Meet the Ensemble
In lieu of the Ensemble’s planned performances at Cecil Sharp House and the Southbank Centre, we released four fantastic live tracks on SoundCloud and introduced each member on Instagram. Thanks to Ensemble member Rowan Collinson, we also have a film of them playing a tune together virtually!
I am glad that lockdown didn’t prevent the Ensemble members from making music together, learning new skills and connecting this month, and I’m looking forward to the next challenge of bringing our free Youth Folk Sampler Days online in May half-term.
Visit www.efdss.org/youthfolk to sign up for a free Youth Folk Sampler Day and find out about auditioning for the National Youth Folk Ensemble.
