Sharing Food & Music Makes Sunraysia Shine

Music and food make great mates, their charismatic combination creates the perfect context for friendships to flourish and where there’s one you will invariably find the other. From Vocal Noshes to music camps and choirs, there is nothing like a spot of music-making to work up an appetite and a gathering of like minded people chatting over a plateful of food after a session of singing or playing is a beautiful thing.

As Community Music Victoria is all about using music to facilitate connections and develop community networks we were very excited to learn from our Growing Community Music Murray Mallee team about what the good folks from Food Next Door Coop and Out of the Box Sunraysia are doing. Work that feels aligned with the values of our own organisation, and to hear about how everybody’s paths came to cross at the end of November.

Food Next Door Coop is a social enterprise scheme connecting newly arrived migrants with existing land owners who have soil space to share, and with vacant or under-utilised farmland in regional and rural areas of Victoria’s North West. It is a model that fosters inclusivity and generates the sharing of ideas in a literal cross-pollination of knowledge and culture, uniting people from diverse backgrounds with members of their new communities and providing them access to land and a way for them to support themselves on arrival in their new country, using farming practices from back home. Creating an avenue to a sustainable source of income and independence helps people to settle  and strengthens community cohesion, while working the land in this way increases the number of small scale farms using sustainable practices beneficial to soil regeneration. The outcome is high quality, organic produce and a healthier landscape, both literally and figuratively, from the grass roots up.

Beats and birthday cake at Out of the Box’s fifth birthday.
Photo credits: Out of the Box Sunraysia

Out of the Box offers local delivery of produce grown in the Sunraysia area using regenerative, organic farming practices and works closely with the Food Next Door Coop as a distribution outlet for their land sharing scheme. Bringing together customers, farmers, volunteers, and landholders, the onus is on keeping food miles down – everything is grown within a 150 kilometre radius of the city – and the boxes are sold on a subscription basis with a lucky dip of produce each week using prices set by the growers. It’s a beautiful way to develop and sustain the community, feeding the people of the township and enriching local community connections by bringing people together and strengthening the network, much in the same way as the community music groups listed on the CMVic database.

And, like music, food grown and shared within the community is not only nurturing, bringing people together at the source, it has a flow on effect. Events like farmers markets create avenues for the sharing and development of ideas and values and offer a springboard for friendships and tighter, healthier, more connected communities. They also provide wonderful performance spaces and opportunities for community choirs and music groups to share their work and spread the joy.

Drumming with Catherine Threlfall. Photo credit: Out of the Box Sunraysia

On November 26th 2022, Out of the Box Sunraysia celebrated its fifth birthday with an extravaganza of music, food and wine that was provided, made and shared by members of the community, including the CMVic Growing Community Music family. Catherine Threlfall led a drumming circle with people of all ages joining in and playing an assortment of percussion including djembes, triangles, and tambourines; there was a band with ukulele and fiddle players and dancing from the Barkindji Dancers, all accompanied by a sumptuous community feast made, of course, from locally sourced foods: Merbein Mushrooms and lentils, beetroot sourdough and even an orange almond birthday cake made with beautiful fresh navel oranges from the region. 

Click here to watch a beautiful clip of the afternoons activities and listen to a moving speech made by Grant Hyam who runs Out of the Box in which he explains what being a part of it has brought to his life.

So if you are beginning the new year full of intentions to live well, joining a community music group or choir is a wonderful way to tick this box straight off the bat. A list of singing and music making opportunities can be accessed for free on the CMVic website. And if you are fortunate enough to live within coo-ee of Sunraysia and the Mallee, exploring the delicious work of the Out of the Box and Food Next Door Coop communities may support the turning over of any new leaves and lead to fresh growth and exciting opportunities as we take on 2023, together. 

‘Off the Chai’ Photo credit: Out of the Box Sunraysia

‘A Shared Affair’ Photo credit: Out of the Box Sunraysia

Written by Deb Carveth, CMVic Copy Editor, in collaboration with Kylie Livingstone, CMVic Growing Community Music Local Catalyst for Mildura, Sunraysia, Mallee

Video Credit: Luke Gange, Gange Productions. Photo Credits: Out of the Box Sunraysia.

Euroa’s Voracious Appetite for the Return of Vocal Nosh

It’s never been hard to get excited about a Vocal Nosh, what’s not to love about informal harmony singing, hearty soup and crusty bread? For the folks of Euroa, the agonising wait for the return of this well-loved event is about to end this weekend, after more than two years in hiatus.

“We had our last Nosh in March 2020 and then it all came tumbling down” laughs Di Mackrell, who shares the facilitation of Euroa Vocal Nosh with Margie Chowanetz and Chris Day.

“The people of Euroa have been asking for it to return so we picked a date in November thinking that by then we’d be heading into the warmer weather and the number of bugs going around would be less.”

“It’s such a good thing to do and the joy that you can see on people’s faces that says ‘okay we’re doing this again’ is wonderful to see.”

-Di Mackrell

When we speak it is already November and Di is reporting sightings of snow on the mountains and is considering lighting the fire. There also appears to be a generous amount of germs going around and Di continues to feel highly responsible for the health and wellbeing of her singers.

“If you organise something and people become ill through attending, you will definitely feel a sense of responsibility, even though it is up to the individuals whether or not they wish to come along, and I do not wish to risk anyone’s health even though people are really wanting this singing as a group experience.”

In addition to her involvement with Euroa Vocal Nosh, Di runs the Strathbogie Singers and is very aware how much getting back to singing this year has meant to people, some of whom travel over an hour each way for the experience. “It’s such a good thing to do and the joy that you can see on people’s faces that says ‘okay we’re doing this again’ is wonderful to see.”

Interestingly, Di has observed that while some of her Strathbogie Singers enjoy Vocal Nosh, for others the inclusive style for which Noshes are so loved can feel intimidating. “Some feel wary of the openness of it and of learning songs aurally. At Nosh we mostly don’t hand out the words or music and I personally think that is really good for our brains, but some of my singers like to have that piece of paper in front of them with the words and the dots, whereas for other folks the dots are scary!” 

When Di experienced her first Vocal Nosh, the love and connection she felt for this informal way of singing together with others was instantaneous “I just loved it.” 

“Fay White, who pioneered the concept of the Vocal Nosh, taught Chris Day at Euroa High School back in the 70’s. By 2001, Chris was working as a music teacher in Euroa together with Linda Browne. Fay invited both Chris and Linda along to a singing leadership training session which was how Euroa Vocal Nosh started off. I just went along to see what it was all about and never had any intention or idea that I was going to lead music because I really wasn’t confident, it’s CMVic that has given me the confidence to do it.” Di laughs as she reflects back on this for a moment. 

Later again, when Linda left town, Chris felt that leading Vocal Nosh was too much to do on her own and by then, Di was not prepared to let it all go and decided that if it was a case of use it or lose it, she should invest in some leadership training and get stuck in, herself. Di hasn’t looked back and neither has the singing community of Euroa.

The celebrated return of Euroa Vocal Nosh also marks the approach of its 21st birthday. As the group moves towards this milestone, Di, Chris and Margie have been putting out feelers to see if anyone can be encouraged to be taken under their wings and trained to lead the Nosh. As Di says, “I know it’s a big thing cos I wasn’t confident to start with either.” 

Something Di particularly loves about Euroa Vocal Nosh is the uniqueness of each session. “You get this group of people who have never sung together before. Thinking back across the past 21 years, I think there has only been once or twice where we’ve not had somebody come along who has never been before, and you wouldn’t think it could keep happening but it does and the beauty of this is it doesn’t matter. Within a few minutes you’ve still got all these amazing harmonies, which is what makes a Nosh so exciting.”

Returning for the first Nosh in over two years has allowed for some changes to be made. Di, Chris and Margie have decided to move the session from its original Sunday evening time slot and turn it into an afternoon activity instead. The email has gone out to everyone with any prior involvement with Euroa Vocal Nosh and the fliers are up: On Sunday November 27th, the Nosh will be back, baby!

For many people, it can’t come back quickly enough. “The Nosh aspect gives people time to socialise and connect. When I think of my Strathbogie Singers, my ukulele group or our Nosh singers, we are an eclectic bunch, but for some people coming together to sing and make music is the bright spot in their week. It’s powerful, it is more than the music,” says Di, “it is just so important.”

Euroa Vocal Nosh returns this Sunday, November 27, 2022, from 2:30-4:30pm. One-to-One Wellness Centre, 121 Binney Street, Euroa. Expect  2 hours of harmony singing and socialising! The cost is  $15 which will include Viv’s sumptuous afternoon tea (children free). Covid safe guidelines and rules apply.

Written by Deb Carveth, Online Editor for Community Music Victoria, with Di Mackrell; thank you Di!

All Directions Choir Summons Songs and Stories from the Deep

All Directions Community Choir has written 5 original songs from scratch as part of an original composition project called Songs and Stories from the Deep, facilitated by choir director, Cath Rutten. 

All Directions Community Choir sits within the Boroondara Community Outreach Program (BCO), a mental health ministry run by the Kew Uniting Church to support people with either disability or mental health challenges, or who are experiencing social isolation. The project received funding from Boroondara City Council through the grants program and the Rotary Club of Balwyn and was run by Cath as a series of workshops using water as a metaphor for living, with the group ‘writing from the heart about their experiences of life; the struggles as well as their sense of joy and adventure’.

“We began playing around with words and emotions as a group and there seemed to be a lot of congruence between the way we describe our feelings and water. We spoke of tears, and drowning or being lifted up and held by the waves of emotion, waves of joy, a congruence between the descriptive words of water and the descriptive words for emotion.”

Cath is a musician who loves working at the intersection of arts and health. In addition to running a singing studio at home, she also teaches inclusive singing practice, and has run a number of community projects including 52 Flash Mobs in 52 Weeks to promote the benefits of arts participation to the community. 

“My belief is that we are inherently artistic and musical as humans and for it to be professionalised so that we think we can’t do it unless we’re fantastic is detrimental to us as people.”

Members of the choir were interested in writing songs that talked about their lived experiences but also about the experience of being human. “All too often members from this community feel categorised by whatever challenges they face and really a lot of the challenges will be very familiar. Many people are facing challenges around secure housing, family and home to a lesser or greater extent, there are so many universal stories in there.”

The group met weekly for six sessions to continue writing and drawing on all of the water metaphors and included non-choir members of the BCO community. The process was encouraged along with inspirational visuals of water, and then Cath took the poems and turned their ideas into songs. Cath describes it as a wonderful journey to have shared. 

Artwork by Leah Ferguson and Belinda Wickens

“Being in a room and playing with lots of people and using words as part of that play, there’s just so much that comes out of it. In a way when you’ve got lots of creative people together, the work seems to do itself, it’s fantastic.”

Cath created the music and worked out the song arrangements so that the material used by the writing group could be learned by the choir. Everything was going swimmingly and according to plan. The choir began learning their songs at the end of 2019 with the view to recording the tracks for wider distribution in early 2020. But of course, like most things from that poor ill-fated year, it all had to stop and be mothballed. Cath says, “during COVID like so many other choirs we went online but a lot of the community did not feel comfortable in that space and numbers dropped to around 10 or 12. At the start, before everyone grew tired, I would sometimes ring people and have a sing on the phone with them as a way to remain connected and to check in and we kept going but with a skeleton crew.”

It took a while once lockdown lifted for All Directions Community Choir to regain its collective confidence about being out and about and to find momentum once more. At the beginning of 2022, the choir began working with a wonderful producer, Cameron Mackenzie, and Songs and Stories from the Deep was finally back on track. “Cameron came into the church and worked with the choir in the space and made the recordings over five or six weeks. It was a really lovely, enjoyable process.”

The CD launch of ‘Songs and Stories from the Deep recently took place, in mid-October. “It was wonderful, we all had such a lovely time with a beautiful big crowd and Boroondara Councillor, Nick Stavrou, came and opened it for us; it was such a warm, loving event.” In keeping with the community spirit of the song writing project, the beautiful promotional artwork accompanying the project was contributed by Cath’s daughter, Leah Ferguson, and the graphic design was done by Belinda Wickens.

Cath crackles with conviction and sparkles as she speaks of the community in which she works and her fondness for the project and the people it has involved, as well as for those who work tirelessly behind the scenes to make it all happen:

“Natalie who is a Reverend of Kew Uniting Church and the Coordinator of BCO does an enormous amount of work. She organises food relief and there are volunteers to come in and cook for people who can’t cook for themselves so that there are freezers full of food, and she does a lot of work for people behind the scenes. The program offers Tai Chi, and as well as the choir, a ukulele group runs on Tuesday mornings; there’s a band that meets and rehearses too and because Natalie’s really committed to finding skilled professionals to work with the choir and the band, there is always a need for funding. I’d love to plug the fact that the songs are for sale as a CD on bandcamp, it’s not very much and people can look up Boroondara Community Outreach if they would like to make a donation, which will go towards the activities that Natalie runs.” 

Something Cath notices repeatedly through her work is how quickly the health benefits of making music together occur and how obvious the effects are:

“It happens as soon as you start, being in a space together with people and singing or making music, our physical and mental health improves immediately and our beautiful souls respond!”

Songs from the Songs and Stories from the Deep are available on bandcamp, and while it is possible to enjoy them without purchase, all money raised from sales of the digital album will go to support the fantastic work done by BCO: 

Click here for a link to the songs: https://alldirectionscommunitychoir.bandcamp.com/album/songs-and-stories-from-the-deep
Click here for more information about BCO https://www.bcokew.org/

Written by Deb Carveth, Copy Editor for Community Music Victoria, in collaboration with Cath Rutten; thank you Cath!

Feature image: Detail of the artwork for Songs and Stories from the Deep, created by Leah Ferguson and Belinda Wickens

Mothers Use the Benefits of Song to Promote Infant Development

A program led by Professor Shannon de l’Etoile from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music aims to help at-risk mothers engage with their babies through singing, to support and promote development of emotional and self-regulation in the infants.

Professor Shannon de l’Etoile knows the impact of a mother’s lullaby.

Early in her career, de l’Etoile witnessed that when disadvantaged mothers were encouraged to sing to their babies, the positive responses they received were amazing. She quickly realised that music was a powerful way to help mothers learn to connect with their infants and to build a relationship with their new child.

This realisation led to de l’Etoile beginning her extensive research into a practice called infant-directed singing, which helps babies learn to regulate their emotions, and allows them to later navigate socialisation, school, and the professional world:

“If a mother can sing in a way that captures the infant’s attention, it can help them tap into those brain structures that they need to develop for self-regulation,” said de l’Etoile, a board-certified music therapist and associate dean of graduate studies at the University of Miami Frost School of Music.

Yet, while singing to infants is something most mothers do naturally—without even realising the benefits—for those in difficult circumstances, infant-directed singing may not be as instinctive, de l’Etoile observed. She has noticed that mothers impacted by depression, domestic violence, or substance exposure may need encouragement and guidance to provide this unique form of caregiving. Read the full article by Megan Ondrizek.

Source: University of Miami

Feature Photo by Anastasia Zhenina on Unsplash

Speech or Song? Identifying How the Brain Perceives Music

New research explores the different ways in which the brain distinguishes between music and speech.

Source: Cognitive Neuroscience Society Press Release

Most neuroscientists who study music have something in common: they play a musical instrument, in many cases from a young age. Their drive to understand how the brain perceives and is shaped by music springs from a deep love of music.

This passion has translated to a wealth of discoveries about music in the brain, including recent work that identifies the ways in which the brain distinguishes between music and speech. 

“Over the past two decades, many excellent studies have shown similar mechanisms between speech and music across many levels,” says Andrew Chang of New York University, a lifelong violinist.

“However, a fundamental question, often overlooked, is what makes the brain treat music and speech signals differently, and why do humans need two distinct auditory signals.”

New work, enabled in part by computational advances, is pointing toward differences in pitch and rhythm as key factors that enable people starting in infancy to distinguish speech from music, as well as how the predictive capabilities of the brain underlie both speech and music perception. 

Exploring acoustical perception in infants

From a young age, cognitive neuroscientist Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden of University of Toronto, Mississauga, has been singing and playing the cello, which have helped to shape her research career.

“I remember sitting in the middle of the cello section and we were playing some particularly beautiful music – one where the whole cello section had the melody,” she says, “and I remember having this emotional response and wondering ‘how is it possible that I can have such a strong emotional response from the vibrations of my strings traveling to my ear? That seems wild!’” 

That experience started der Nederlanden on a long journey of wanting to understand how the brain processes music and speech in early development. Specifically, she and colleagues are investigating whether babies, who are learning about communicative sounds through experience, even know the difference between speech and song. 

“These are seemingly simple questions that actually have a lot of theoretical importance for how we learn to communicate,” she says.

“We know that from age 4, children can and readily do explicitly differentiate between music and language. Although that seems pretty obvious there has been little to no data asking children to make these sorts of distinctions.” 

At a recent Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) meeting, der Nederlanden presented on new data collected right before and during the COVID-19 pandemic about the acoustic features that shape music and language during development. In one experiment, 4-month-old infants heard speech and song, both in a sing-songy infant-directed manner and in a monotone speaking voice, while recording electrical brain activity with electroencephalogram (EEG). 

“This work novelly suggests that infants are better at tracking infant-directed utterances when they’re spoken compared to sung, and this is different from what we see in adults who are better at neural tracking sung compared to spoken utterances,” she says.

They also found that pitch and rhythm each affected brain activity for speech compared to song, for example, finding that exaggerated pitch was related to better neural tracking of infant-directed speech – identifying the lack of “pitch stability” as an important acoustic feature for guiding attention in babies. 

While the exaggerated, unstable pitch contours of infant-directed speech, has been well-established as a feature infants love, this new research shows it also helps to signal whether someone is hearing speech or song.

Pitch stability is a feature, der Nederlanden says, that “might signal to a listener ‘oh this sounds like someone singing,’” and the lack of pitch stability can conversely signal to infants that they are hearing speech rather than playing with sounds in song.

In an online experiment, der Nederlanden and colleagues asked kids and adults to qualitatively describe how music and language are different. “This gave me a rich dataset that tells me a lot about how people think music and language differ acoustically and also in terms of how the functional roles of music and language differ in our everyday lives,” she explains.

“For the acoustic differences, kids and adults described features like tempo, pitch, rhythm as important features for differentiating speech and song.”

In future work, der Nederlanden hopes to move toward more naturalistic settings, including using mobile EEG to test music and language processing outside of the lab.

“I think the girl sitting in the orchestra pit, geeking out about music and emotion, would be pretty excited to find out that she’s still asking questions about music and finding results that could have answered her questions from over 20 years ago!”

Identifying the predictive code of music

Guilhem Marion of Ecole Normale Supérieure has two passions that drive his research: music and computer science. He has combined those interests to create novel computational models of music that are helping researchers understand how the brain perceives music through “predictive coding,” similar to how people predict patterns in language.

“Predictive coding theory explains how the brain tries to predict the next note while listening to music, which is exactly what computational models of music do for generating new music,” he explains. Marion is using those models to better understand how culture affects music perception, by pulling in knowledge based on individual environments and knowledge. 

In new work conducted with Giovanni Di Liberto and colleagues, Marion recorded EEG activity of 21 professional musicians who were listening to or imagining in their minds four Bach choral pieces. In one study, they were able to identify the amount of surprise for each note, using a computational model based on a large database of Western music. This surprise was a “cultural marker of music processing,” Marion says, showing how closely the notes were predicted based on a person’s native musical environment. 

“Our study showed for the first time the average EEG response to imagined musical notes and showed that they were correlated with the musical surprise computed using a statistical model of music,” Marion says. “This work has broad implications in music cognition but more generally in cognitive neuroscience, as they will enlighten the way the human brain learns new language or other structures that will later shape its perception of the world.”

“These findings are the basis for the potential applications in clinical and child development domains, such as whether music can be used as an alternative form of verbal communication for individuals with aphasia, and how music facilitates infants learning speech.” -Andrew Chang

Chang says that such computational-based work is enabling a new type of music cognition study that balances good experimental control with ecological validity, something challenging for the complexity involved in music and speech sounds. “You often either make the sounds unnatural if everything is well controlled for your experimental purpose or preserve their natural properties of speech or music, but it then becomes difficult to fairly compare the sounds between experimental conditions,” he explains. “Marion and Di Liberto’s groundbreaking approach enables researchers to investigate, and even isolate, the neural activities while listening to a continuous natural speech or music recording.

Chang, who has been playing violin since he was 8-years old, is excited to see the progress that has been made in music cognition studies just in the last decade. “When I started my PhD in 2013, only a few labs in the world were focusing on music,” he says. “But now there are many excellent junior and even well-established senior researchers from other fields, such as speech, around the globe starting to get involved or even devoted to music cognitive neuroscience research.”

Understanding the relationship between music and language “can help us explore the fundamental questions of human cognition, such as why humans need music and speech, and how humans communicate and interact with each other via these forms,” Chang says. “Also, these findings are the basis for the potential applications in clinical and child development domains, such as whether music can be used as an alternative form of verbal communication for individuals with aphasia, and how music facilitates infants learning speech.”

Author: Lisa M.P. Munoz
Source: Cognitive Neuroscience Society Press Release
Contact: Lisa M.P. Munoz – Cognitive Neuroscience Society Public Information Officer, Cognitive Neuroscience Society
cns.publicaffairs[@]gmail.com

Reproduced on the CMVic Blog with kind permission from Lisa M.P. Munoz
Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

Original research: The results were presented at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. The symposium “From Acoustics to Music or Speech: Their (Dis)Similar Perceptual Mechanisms” took place at 1:30pmPT on Tuesday, April 26, as part of the CNS 2022 annual meeting from April 23-26, 2022.

CNS is committed to the development of mind and brain research aimed at investigating the psychological, computational, and neuroscientific bases of cognition. Since its founding in 1994, the Society has been dedicated to bringing its 2,000 members worldwide the latest research to facilitate public, professional, and scientific discourse.

Singing in the Brain

Summary: Researchers have identified a population of neurons in the auditory cortex that responds to singing, but not any other type of music.

For the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a population of neurons in the human brain that lights up when we hear singing, but not other types of music.

These neurons, found in the auditory cortex, appear to respond to the specific combination of voice and music, but not to either regular speech or instrumental music. Exactly what they are doing is unknown and will require more work to uncover, the researchers say.

“The work provides evidence for relatively fine-grained segregation of function within the auditory cortex, in a way that aligns with an intuitive distinction within music,” says Sam Norman-Haignere, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

“There’s one population of neurons that responds to singing, and then very nearby is another population of neurons that responds broadly to lots of music.”

Norman-Haignere

The work builds on a 2015 study in which the same research team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify a population of neurons in the brain’s auditory cortex that responds specifically to music. In the new work, the researchers used recordings of electrical activity taken at the surface of the brain, which gave them much more precise information than fMRI.

“There’s one population of neurons that responds to singing, and then very nearby is another population of neurons that responds broadly to lots of music. At the scale of fMRI, they’re so close that you can’t disentangle them, but with intracranial recordings, we get additional resolution, and that’s what we believe allowed us to pick them apart,” says Norman-Haignere.

Read the full article by Anne Trafton, here

**A big thank you to Kass Mulvany for sharing this with us all!
Featured image by Rhendi Rukmana via unsplash.com

Singing in the Brain

For the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a population of neurons in the human brain that light up when you hear singing, but not other types of music. Credit: MIT

Good Vibrations: How the infectious energy of John Lane makes life feel better

All my training has been on the job and I have learnt it by doing it… I always loved singing and I loved acting and I liked being the centre of attention, I guess, whether it was in music or theatre.” This love of the limelight may have been a starting point, but John Lane has spent his entire working life bringing others into the frame to experience the joy of participation that has perpetuated his own effervescent, irrepressible energy and enthusiasm for community arts practice.

“Being in musical vibration together with others is the closest I get to being really spiritual, that’s my spiritual observance, it’s why I like going to the footy; if your team wins you get to sing with 20,000 people! This world with all this pain and sorrow also has all this beauty and one way of plugging into that, viscerally, is to be vibrating in harmony together.”

Having learned piano as a child, John branched out into trumpet and the French horn at secondary school before teaching himself to play the guitar, inspired by the likes of Neil Young and Bob Dylan. “I took every opportunity I could to be a part of productions, both at school and university where I was very much into musical theatre.” 

After three years of medical school, John decided to take a gap year to try and get theatre out of his system. This was a plan destined never to work. He was offered a job in Brisbane and spent three immersive years touring political musical comedy shows with the Popular Theatre Troupe, also organising and running drama workshops and improvisations based on what he had been doing in student theatre workshops, back in Melbourne. John found he couldn’t stop soaking up skills and knowledge in whatever ways he could from whomever he could.  “I worked my chops up by just ‘doing it’ and learning on the job from watching other people.”

“This world with all this pain and sorrow also has all this beauty and one way of plugging into that, viscerally, is to be vibrating in harmony together.”

While living in Queensland, John bumped into a fella named Linsey Pollak and the two of them went busking together; John played tenor saxophone and Linsey played a broom, the end of which he’d turned into a flute (of course). “We played songs that he had written, and some that we both knew, and it was Linsey who first said to me ‘you could write your own songs!’” Having been given his first lessons in the ukulele by Joe Geia from the band ‘No Fixed Address‘, John would carry his banjolele with him everywhere he went – wearing it slung around his back, ready to whip out at any point and pair it with a quick bit of kazoo to entertain people at festivals or in the streets, in the piazzas of Rome, Bologna and Perugia perhaps, and even on a 24 hour bus trip from Dharamsala to Kashmir.

“The only real formal performance training I did was later on, with the Nanjing Acrobats of China, spending six days a week with them for three months in Wodonga, practising alongside members of the Fruit Fly Circus and Circus Oz. I was open to anything and everything and by that stage was feeling ‘this is so much fun, everyone should have this opportunity’. ”

John’s primary focus became finding ways for other people to experience the joy that he’d had of participating and being ‘in it’. For the first ten years of his working life, John acknowledges that he was very lucky to have been employed full time doing theatre with the type of community-based theatre companies where you weren’t just an actor, you were involved in writing the material, creating sets and props and anything and everything else.

“With West Theatre we went into housing commissions, we did projects with the Vietnamese Community at a time when they had newly arrived in Australia, we worked with the Nurses Union, we put on these very professional big community shows. There was a collective of between 7 and 12 professional theatre makers and together we would run events that involved dozens to hundreds of people in the community, putting on shows that were sometimes political, often based around personal and local issues; and community music was always a big part of that work.”

By this point it was the mid-80s and John became heavily involved in festivals around Melbourne and across Victoria. “Festivals were the most obvious opportunity for lots and lots of people to participate in a cultural event. These could be run as projects with artists in schools and artists in the community that culminated in a festival.”

Towards the end of a long period of freelancing, one of the jobs John started doing in 2000 was working for the Royal Children’s Hospital. “They had acquired funding from VicHealth to engage professional arts facilitators to work in schools and they were looking for a coordinator. I got that gig which was 2 days a week for 6 months and this kept going as an annual contract job among the many other jobs I was doing like the Darebin Music Feast, the Kites Festival and the Kew Festival, and stuff for the Royal Melbourne Show and City of Melbourne.”

Unsurprisingly, John had also learned to juggle by this point which came in handy and helped him to keep all these professional balls in the air at the same time, as well as beanbags, skittles, fruit, kitchen knives and whatever else came to hand.

Striving to support the voice of people who had been oppressed or suppressed drove John’s passion for agitprop theatre.

“It was therapeutic for me to be involved with music and with drama and I was always really interested in the application of creative arts techniques to psychological medicine, which I had only just begun to research as part of my medical training. This stuck with me and became a personal political goal of doing this type of work because of its benefit to people’s mental health… including mine!”

The Royal Children’s Hospital’s “Festival for Healthy Living” (FHL) program was an embodiment of this philosophy, and upon taking up a newly created salaried role of FHL Artistic Coordinator, by 2004 John found he had gone full circle from leaving medical school in 1976 back to working within a hospital where he remained until his retirement from that post in October 2021. 

So how did John keep up his energy? “Keeping a role for myself as a hands-on participant, even when I was coordinating projects, was vital for me. I’d end up being an MC or I’d pop up in the band playing the trumpet or tenor horn, keyboards or uke. I think my work as an overall coordinator suffered sometimes because I was so obsessed with being in things, but I gradually realised I didn’t need to be front and centre and that my role in life as I got older was in being a facilitator and capacity builder.”

John firmly believes that some of the best capacity building happens by learning on the job, side by side with someone who is really experienced. “I would be there alongside emerging artists, doing the stilt walking or juggling workshops, or building a gigantic puppet or encouraging kids in a songwriting session. At other times the job was all about writing funding submissions or facilitating steering committees, but doing only that would never last very long with me and I had to find at least some time to keep working on the ground. It was a crazy life rushing hither and thither!”

Finding ways to help people feel better, and experience wellness from connecting with other people in their communities, schools or families, working for the Royal Children’s Hospital proved to be a great way in for John to build countless productive partnerships in over 30 different communities across Victoria. More recently, working closely with local agencies, under the RCH/FHL banner the annual Dream Big Festival was established in Melton. This was run for the first time in 2015, with John at the helm as Artistic Director.

A year later, John decided he needed more brass back in his life and joined Melbourne-based street band, Havana Palava (cos he obviously had so much spare time on his hands). There he met Lyndal Chambers who at that time was coordinating CMVic’s StreetSounds project. As part of a collaboration between StreetSounds and the Dream Big Festival, together they established The Fabulous Meltones Street Band.

Facilitating the band was an opportunity for John to embrace participatory music-making and perform on a regular basis while bringing together community players of brass, strings, percussion and more, in a riot of colour and sound. The band has played at the Dream Big Festival each year, and at dozens of other community events including the local Djerriwarrh Festival, and also featured in spectacular appearances at Geelong After Dark for three consecutive years.

Since his ‘rewirement’ last month, John has been reflecting back on all of this history and allowing himself to dream of what might come next.

“In the future I do see myself as always wanting to get community music to happen with people of all ages.”

If history is anything to go by, John won’t be sitting still in one place for very long before his energy fizzes over and propels him towards his next adventure. There may be kazoos… Watch this space!

Written by Deb Carveth, Online Editor for Community Music Victoria, with John Lane

Photos supplied

Uke Lovers Get inTo the BUF in Ashburton

Boroondara Ukulele Festival (BUF) was born of Margaret Crichton’s desire to bring something to an area of Melbourne where, for some years, she has been running a number of community music groups. Back when plans were evolving for BUF, COVID wasn’t even a thing. Having experienced restrictions derail so many other face to face events since then,  Margaret, who is a program coordinator for CMVic, has been making ‘contingency plan after contingency plan’ to ensure the show goes on.

If by the end of September,  BUF is not able to go ahead ‘in real life’ then depending on the levels of regulations, Margaret and the CMVic team are ready, with a myriad of creative ways tucked up their sleeves to ensure its delivery, either entirely online, or as a hybrid event.  

“We all need to be able to plan things, we need it for our personal wellbeing, we need to have something to look forward and aspire to… it’s a bit like having that recipe where you go, ooh I’d love to make it but I haven’t got quite those ingredients I’ll just substitute this, and it might not be the same but it will still be amazing.”

BUF will feature a range of workshop topics offered by a host of leaders from across Victoria. There will be banjo techniques for ukulele and banjolele by Julie Bradley from Gippsland, Dan McEoin, the man behind the Hills Ukulele Festival and current president of AUTLA will be teaching picking techniques, Bruce Watson will be doing what he’s calling “I’ve got rhythm, Uke got rhythm” and running a session of his surely world-famous-by now, Ukeoke. Oli Hinton and Dave Rackham will be running bass workshops. 

As Margaret points out, “if you’ve got an instrument with four strings or even a guitar handy you’ll be able to have a go at the bass workshops, you won’t necessarily need to have a bass ukulele. And if BUF runs online, remember when you’re in a Zoom room no-one else can hear but the cat, you so you’ll be able to pick up a lot of techniques for when you can get your hands on a bass.”

Margaret will be offering a beginners workshop where there will be ukuleles and some basses to borrow for anyone coming along who has never played before. “If people come along to my workshop knowing nothing, they’ll be able to play something by the end of it, and if they know a little bit, they’ll leave knowing how to play a little bit more”.

Nicki Johnson and Craig Barrie will be leading a song writing workshop for ukulele, and the day will end with Tom Jackson leading a Q&A session to answer any uke-related questions to wrap things up.

What Margaret wants more than anything is for people to come to BUF and have a really good time, to learn new skills and make new connections.

“Should we all still be in lockdown,  connection is what we’ll need. If we can bring some brightness into people’s days – even if they can’t be in the room with us literally, we’ll bring them into our rooms.”

BUF is a testimony to Margaret’s longstanding love for the humble ukulele which began back when she was a child. “When I was about 10, I wanted a guitar but we couldn’t afford one so I had to save up. In the meantime I got a ukulele and played that for a little while. Then, eight or nine years ago, when ukulele really took off, I decided to get another one and predictably it was purple…” The CMVic queen of all things purple and a staunch devotee of stringed instruments from ukes to harps, Margaret still loves the uke’s accessibility for people of all ages and all levels of ability. “It doesn’t really matter what age you are, you can pick it up and instantly play a song.”

Margaret with one of her trusty four-stringed friends

Community Music Victoria will host BUF on September 24-25 in partnership with AUTLA and Pat’s Music. For all of the info click here and watch the CMVic socials for booking details, coming soon!

Written by Deb Carveth, CMVic Online Editor, with Margaret Crichton, CMVic Program Coordinator

Feature photo: Bennettswood Ukulele Groups and Singalong and Stringalong (BUGSS) at Hawthorn Market, supplied

Making Music, Chocolate for the Soul

By Scarlet Lee

A common mindset when approaching musical participation, especially working collaboratively, is that you need to reach a certain skill set before you can perform. However performance can have many advantages beyond other people enjoying your music.

Community Music Victoria is driven by the belief that every person should have access to the benefits of making music regardless of skill set. Making music can help improve our state of mind and stimulates the brain. Performing in a group provides opportunities to socialise and build friendships, and can also build up our team-based skills.

From personal experience as someone who plays the ukulele, performance is exponentially more enjoyable if it’s in a group. It gives the feeling that you are part of something more and that you’re contributing to something meaningful. It’s as though you are helping create a masterpiece in an auditory art form.

From a medicinal standpoint music can provide clear benefits. In treating depressive illnesses, four out of five trials involving music therapy were shown to be effective, this can be correlated to the brain’s reward centre. When a person is singing or playing music it triggers the reward system in the same way it does for things such as eating chocolate. This indicates that participation in musical activities can improve your mood. Additionally, researchers theorise that music making can stimulate the cerebral cortex which manages higher functions such as memory, correlation and processing of information. By stimulating the cerebral cortex it is essentially providing a warm-up for that area of the brain which allows it to process information more effectively.

Medically speaking, it is evident that there are advantages to playing music, especially in terms of mental health and cognitive function.

Although solo music playing can be constructive, singing and playing music in a group provides all the same health benefits whilst also introducing a social aspect. Making music in a group allows for social interaction and collective catharsis. We can express emotion through music as a group and certain song choices can provoke certain emotions. It also provides a sense of belonging for those included as they are part of a collective, and share experiences with their musical comrades. Friendships can also be built and strengthened through communal music, as everyone is participating in the same thing and building skills and confidence together.

Expanding on this, collective music making can build teamwork and communication skills through working collaboratively with others and learning how to have discussions with fellow group members.

Overall there are many reasons to participate in communal music making. Group music can improve mood and provide a cognitive warm-up, both of which have clear benefits to wellbeing. There is also a strong social aspect involved when playing music with others, and there is a sense of belonging and feeling like you are contributing to something greater than yourself.

As someone learning the ukulele I can personally verify that playing music definitely has its benefits, but when participating in a music group it is far more rewarding. The atmosphere itself is much more lighthearted and warm. There is opportunity for conversation or constructive feedback and you get to appreciate others abilities as well as the group’s as a whole. When you compare this to solo practise or performance you miss all the laughter and joy that comes from collaboration.

There is a strong social aspect involved when playing music with others, and there is a great sense of belonging and feeling that you are contributing to something greater than yourself…

Music is often a key component that relates to many cultures and allows people to be immersed in their culture. The engagement in our own culture is important, as we gain a sense of inclusion within our cultural community. Through music people can gain a stronger understanding of their identity and culture, and the identities and cultures of others. For example in Indigenous Australian culture the stories of creation are told through songs and music, and sacred music performed in ceremonies are a crucial aspect of indigenous culture. In terms of my own culture my father is British, and always enjoys when I play popular British songs on the ukulele. This illustrates how we can connect with our culture and share parts of our culture through music.

Overall there are many reasons to participate in communal music making. Group music can improve mood and provide a cognitive warm-up, both of which have clear benefits to wellbeing. There is also a strong social aspect involved when singing and playing music with others. Friendships and skills develop, and there is a sense of belonging and feeling like you are contributing to something greater than yourself.

Scarlet Lee is a year 10 student and a keen ukulele player who joined the CMVic team for work experience in April and May

Photo supplied

Use of Auslan in Choirs and Music Programs

By Karen Kyriakou

It comes as no surprise that with the current ban on singing in Victorian schools, our ever-resourceful music teachers are looking for creative and safe ways to involve students in end of year celebrations and graduations.  With the increased exposure of Auslan in mainstream media through the bushfire season and of course this whole dreadful COVID business, it makes sense that teachers are considering using Auslan in their music classes. It is wonderful to see the substantial recognition that Auslan is getting from mainstream media which has resulted in a massive interest — and that Auslan courses are booked out to the maximum.

For the last 11 years, I have been working as a music teacher at a Deaf school in Melbourne. I have had to learn Auslan to do my job. And I still am still very much learning.

Music teachers are becoming interested in using Auslan as a way to include students in singing-replacement activities. I was asked to write something about the use of Auslan under these circumstances.
Because the Deaf community is not primarily my cultural community I felt it was not appropriate that I speak for them, although this message has since been read by members of that community. So I am writing this as a music teacher — to my music teacher community – sharing my knowledge and experience with Auslan.

Here’s some things to think about if you are considering using Auslan in your school music program — or any school program.

Firstly, what is Auslan?

 Auslan, or Australian Sign Language is the native sign language of the Deaf community. As a cultural group, it is appropriate to use a capital ‘D’ when referring to a Deaf person from this community. The language has its own grammar, sentence structure, and uses facial expression and specific areas of the body as part of the language.  Also, Auslan is not written with ‘all capitals’.

You can find more information about Auslan here

It can be fun to learn a few Auslan signs.

But learning a few signs isn’t learning Auslan nor makes one fluent in the language.

What isn’t Auslan?

 Auslan is not English in sign language. It isn’t ‘actions’ to words.  And it certainly isn’t ‘choralography’ (I never, ever will like that word!).

With its own sentence and grammatical structure, Auslan signs can’t be imposed over English words as the language then makes no sense due to the structure, similarly found in other non-English languages.

So how do you interpret songs into Auslan?

Songs are not ‘translated’ straightforwardly from English into Auslan – they are interpreted, and every Auslan user and interpreter would come up with their own interpretation of the same song given the chance. Songs are full of idioms, imagery and metaphors and as you might imagine, interpreting these into Auslan would not be easy! You have to convey the meaning of the metaphor, not the translation of the English language.

If the Auslan and message of the song cannot be understood by a Deaf Auslan user then it can’t be used in our choirs. (Also, important to note that because of the language structure, one doesn’t sing along when signing.)

If you are copying an Auslan video without knowing the signs, how would you ‘teach’ Auslan to your students? How would you know what sign is what word? Or if you are using an Auslan dictionary to
seek out signs, how will you know the order and structure required?Auslan is very context dependent and there are dialects to think of too. Sometimes it is appropriate to ‘make up’ signs to describe something but this involves a specific process that would include the input and consultation of a few Deaf people or community. How will you know if you are using a true sign or a descriptive one? For example, in a song I am doing currently with my students, the lyrics are ‘The call of the birds bring the break of day’. We are signing Morning, Sunrise, Birds, Sing. The words don’t match the signs as they play out in real time and we are also incorporating culturally appropriate features such as pace, facial expression and upper body movement.

Authentic Cultural Experiences

We should be striving to offer our students authentic cultural learning experiences. We want our students to learn to respect different cultures and their customs and traditions. Auslan is at the heart of the culture of the Deaf community and therefore it should be taught by a native user. Consider this in parallel with the wishes of Indigenous people to be able to share their own culture, stories and history.

Is it a problem if I use Auslan with my choir?

In short, highly likely.

When I started learning Auslan it was all I could talk about. I love the language so much, and as a musician and conductor, the link with non verbal communication and expression was profound. I wanted to use Auslan every day in every way and probably — almost certainly— made every mistake in the book regarding its use.  I know much better now. At the request of the Deaf community, they ask we don’t use Auslan without proper instruction and direction.

Unless a Deaf Auslan user is involved in teaching the song, bringing the correct cultural and linguistic references, it is unlikely that the language will be used correctly. This is incredibly important to the Deaf community, a minority group, who have fought for the right to use their language and to have their language used correctly by others.

Incorrect use of a language of a minority group is cultural appropriation

It is important that a Deaf person be able to understand the performance of your song. If not, the language has been misused or appropriated, even if unintentionally.

Hopefully this nasty COVID virus will be gone and before too long we can resume singing and playing our wind and brass instruments. But music teachers are a creative cohort, so maybe for this especially odd year we make our graduations songs instrumental  items instead, or maybe include student compositions or maybe even accompany a recorded song?

And you know what? This in itself makes a really important learning opportunity for you to share with your students. If you have started a song in Auslan and now have second thoughts about continuing, then you can use this as an opportunity to explain to the students
why and how you have come to this decision. We really have no shortage of musical activities to do with our students, so at this time, in this unforgettable year where teachers have demonstrated
flexibility in unquantifiable measures, we might just need to accept that we will have to do something else instead.

Karen Kyriakou is a music teacher and freelance educator working with arts organisations including MSO, Musica Viva, the Melbourne Recital Centre and ANAM. In 2012 she won a Churchill Fellowship,
travelling to the UK to investigate inclusive ways of bringing authentic educational and musical experiences to the Deaf children in schools.

Rachelle Stevens is an experienced classroom teacher, Deaf herself, and an all-round awesome person. She meticulously checked this article to make sure I represented the views of her Deaf community
correctly.

Article by Karen Kyriakou.

CMVic is grateful to AMusE for their kind permission to use this content. Thank you AMusE! CMVic would also like to thank Steph Payne for bringing it to our attention in the first place; thank you Steph!