for-Wards: Curating a Hyperlocal Compositional Methodological Framework

Bobbie-Jane Gardner

In this exposition, I present the curatorial methods I devised to create a hyperlocal compositional methodology used in the research project, for-Wards. for-Wards is a two-year citywide music programme involving a large-scale artistic partnership to co-create new music within and about forty Birmingham wards. The curated hyperlocal methodological framework I constructed was used to support the creation of hyperlocal musical works. I use the term ‘hyperlocal’ which is borrowed from the realm of citizen journalism. It infers community-produced news that is extremely localised. Hyperlocal is concerned with events and stories within a specific geographic community (Radcliffe 2012).

for-Wards citywide: Curating a Hyperlocal Compositional Methodological Framework

This section examines the bespoke hyperlocal compositional methodology created for the for-Wards citywide project focussing on the curated aspects of the compositional process:

Research: Conversations with Trusted Peers/Community Meetings

The first stage of developing this methodology involved researching a suitable framework through which to run a citywide collaborative compositional project. In the for-Wards pilot, I supported the two other composers with their composing workshops. However, I did not have the capacity to closely support nine other composers and forty community groups running concurrently. It was evident that a bigger team was necessary.

Steering group

I set up a steering group consisting of a membership who had influential working connections in the arts, cultural and music education sectors within Birmingham. Their role was to provide in-kind support based on their experience of working in community settings, public art, music events, and education. Initially, the steering group met every four to six weeks to ensure we actioned our targets. They also provided encouragement for the preparatory stages of the music programme. The steering group membership expanded and changed during project delivery. Once for-Wards was in motion, the group met quarterly and during important stages of the programme to work as a critical friend and provide input for strategic decisions.

Project Planning: Organisational Model and Funding

On the advice of the steering group, I used a business organisation structure called a flat organisational model in which my partners reported directly to me in my role as Artistic Director. The flat organisational structure was used because it offers great flexibility, allows for good communication and relationships between different roles, and enables a fast decision-making processes, giving partners increased responsibility and autonomy.

I set the organisational model so that we would work in five districts per year, with each district run by an artistic partner. Each year I enlisted five artistic partners and asked them to commission one composer and support them to select four community groups.

While recruiting arts organisations to work as artistic partners, I gained insight into the current financial and capacity struggles that arts organisations were facing (Harvey, 2016). It appeared very unlikely that I would be able to raise enough funding to support forty composer commissions to work in one ward each. This is the reason why for-Wards resulted in being ten commissions as it seemed more achievable and deliverable than forty separate ones. For the compositional work to take place in a hyperlocal environment, all the artistic and creative partnerships needed to be from Birmingham. However, it was not possible to recruit an artistic partner from each of the ten districts because most arts organisations are situated in the centre of Birmingham. Instead, each artistic partner selected the district in which they wished to work and thus further supported community access to arts and music making across the city.

The project was successful in receiving external funding from: Arts Council England, Performing Rights Foundation, The Feeney Trust, Birmingham City Council, various Birmingham artistic partners, and received crowdfunding from generous Pledge Music supporters. This meant that, in addition to the artistic partners, a small team of Outreach Coordinators, a Marketing Manager and a Producer could support project delivery.

Project Planning: People

In response to audience feedback in the for-Wards pilot about the lack of musical diversity in the presentation of work, I wanted to ensure the composers selected were from a wide range of musical backgrounds and disciplines. As a result, the nine Birmingham-based artistic partners recruited to the team selected a district and a Birmingham composer, and supported the engagement of community groups, promoted performances, and provided funds for the composer commissions. The artistic partners are listed below:

Access Creative College: A national Further Education college supporting performing arts based in Ladywood district.

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group: a Ladywood district-based chamber ensemble specialising in the performance of new and contemporary classical music.

capsule: a Ladywood district-based arts organisation programming and commissioning alternative, unclassifiable new music for curious audiences.

Flatpack Projects: a Ladywood district-based film programming arts organisation.

Hare and Hounds: a world-leading music venue based in Hall Green district.

Kalaboration: based in Ladywood district, programming and producing visual and performing artwork from the Asian and black diaspora.

MAC Birmingham: an arts centre in Hall Green district specialising in contemporary work.

Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (Birmingham City University): a music conservatory based in Ladywood district.

Wassifa CIC: an organisation supporting the Black History narrative by celebrating and acknowledging the achievements, contributions, and struggles of the black community.

This following table details the artistic partner's curation of their chosen district(s):

Curating Compositional Practice: Field Recording Skills

While I was setting up the artistic partnerships and preparing external funding applications, I was successful in an application for a Feeney Artist Fellowship. The fellowship supports artistic professional development in the use of field recording and ensured I had a better understanding of how to train my team of composers to ensure the field recordings were captured to a high standard. I received mentoring from three music specialists who work with field recordings, often in innovative ways. Duncan Chapman is a sound artist and music workshop leader. During our mentoring sessions, he shared various ways composers have utilised field recordings in their compositional output, describing works such as:

The Nightingale in The Pines of Rome by Respighi who used field recordings to locate the listener in a particular environment;
Cantus Arcticus by Rautavaara who used field recordings as a conversation between recorded sounds (in this case, birds) and instruments;
Trans by Stockhausen demonstrates how a shuttle sound appears to trigger changes in the music.

Chapman suggested the idea could be developed further with audible cues from recordings triggering different fragments or phrases. An example of field recordings where musical phrases were extracted and embedded into a piece was Different Trains by Steve Reich. He took the contours of speech rhythms and made them into instrumental music. Gavin Bryars' Jesus' Blood is an example of a field recording loop that is orchestrated, accompanying the voice of a homeless person's singing.

I ran training sessions for the for-Wards composers and asked my field recording mentors to share their practice and present the various methods of incorporating field recordings into music composition. In particular, Gavin Bryars’ technique of using instruments to accompany field recordings was adopted by composers Pram in Under the Blossom and Xhosa Cole in Moving Ladywood.

Curating Spaces

I curated the for-Wards community engagement to include field recording and composing workshops. The activities took place in the localities where the communities were based. I also specified that all the premieres of the for-Wards commissions had to take place in the working district, in situ. Each compositional team (artistic partner, composer and community group) were set the task of finding a suitable performance space. There was an emphasis on non-concert halls in order to remove barriers to prospective audiences and encourage local communities to engage with performances on their doorstep. The performance spaces chosen included several church halls, an outdoor community garden, a park, hotel basement bars and a school. This curatorial method is connected to site-specific approaches where the art object loses meaning outside of the site in which it was created. This is in reference to older ideas of site-specific art, where the arts object asserts a proper relationship with its location. (see Kaye, 2000, 1).

Receipt of additional funding also enabled the delivery of a launch event to raise awareness of such an ambitious citywide undertaking. Project partners, community partners, local press and the general public, were invited to join in the festivities. The event also included performances by some of the selected composers, tasty treats from a local Caribbean caterer and free rum punches. I selected The Rainbow Roof Top venue for the launch event due to its panoramic views of the city, setting the framework for a Birmingham-based music programme. Planning and preparation involved ensuring the marketing strategy was appropriate. This included the creation of flyers and promotional materials that had suitable, non-specialist and welcoming language geared towards engaging with the wider community, a strategy that was maintained throughout the project.

The collaborative music-making methodological framework has nine stages:

1. Set up artistic partnerships

2. Agree on compositional brief with artistic partners

3. Devise collaborative compositional methods

4. Deliver workshops

5. Reflexive practice

6. Modify collaborative compositional methods

7. Deliver composing workshops

8. Rehearsal

9. Sharing/Performance

The curatorial methodological framework is in six stages:

1. Research

2. Steering group

3. Project Planning

4. Project Delivery

5. Evaluation

6. Archive

Evaluation

In Art: Process: Change (Leeson, 2017) Leeson discusses three different modes of evaluation process, which I used during for-Wards. The first mode is what Leeson calls a Freire-inspired dialectic, where working processes are assessed. In a similar fashion, the first stage of evaluation in for-Wards was undertaken through meetings with artistic partners, community groups and composers. At the start of the programme, we booked an independent assessor to support evaluation, similar to the second evaluation process that Leeson describes. The third type of evaluation involved an end-of-project report to commissioning bodies and funders (Leeson, 2017: 108). I completed several evaluation reports at the request of Arts Council England, Performing Rights Society Foundation and Birmingham City Council as a stipulation of funding being received.

Smith and Dean's ‘iterative cyclic web’ (Smith, Dean, 2009) is an instructional assessment of practice-based methods realised through various stages of repetition and iteration. This was used to assess the efficacy of the curation of hyperlocal environments. I was able to reiterate various curatorial methods such as the flat organisational model which worked well. I made adjustments via evaluation feedback to the composer commission brief. In doing so, I realised that the brief needed to be more ward-specific. Not all of the commissions in year one focussed on each community and ward, but rather the district as a whole, which I felt was not hyperlocal enough. I also made significant changes to the core team to ensure the hyperlocal environment conditions were fertile for compositional creativity. During year one, I worked with Number 11 Arts, a collective of arts practitioners who are based in each of Birmingham’s ten districts. Together, they support arts provision for local communities and each coordinator is based in one of Birmingham’s ten districts. The ten coordinators also have a direct relationship with the communities in their district because they live there, which seemed ideal for for-Wards. However, in year two I ceased working with Number 11 Arts as working with five coordinators proved difficult, mostly due to communication challenges which affected my team and artistic partners. I decided to keep the roles in-house and recruited two outreach coordinators who would work directly with my team. The two outreach coordinators were given three districts to care for and had more time to work closely with artistic partners, community groups and composers. Consequently, this had a positive effect on the programme, reducing conflicts and enabling any that arose to be tackled quickly.

Positively, during evaluation, most of the artistic partners involved in year one of the project wanted to continue to work on for-Wards in year two. Most artistic partners said they felt it had taken them some time to understand the nature of the project and were keen to have another attempt at working in this way. In year one, Access Creative College had trialled a composer team where the lead composer Justin K Broadrick relied heavily on a composer assistant to support community-based work. However, this did not work well because the community groups had limited contact time with Broadrick. There was not enough interaction and connection between the composer and community. The final work, An Ode to York’s Wood did not face the community enough and became more of an artist facing, deeply personal creation by Broadrick. In year two, Access Creative were definitive in ensuring their selected composer would directly work with community collaborators.

The 'Shadow Curator'

In for-Wards’ second year, Sacramento and Zeiske's Artocracy – an apt curatorial handbook sharing collaborative practice – was recommended to me and their insights had a significant impact on the curation of the project. Sacramento and Zeiske devised a role entitled the 'Shadow Curator', and it is 'to the curator what the Shadow Minister is to the Minster in British politics: a position of peaceful antagonist, or of agonism' (Sacramento, Zeiske, 2010: 16). This curatorial invention inspired the creation of the 'shadow composer' role which I added as a separate hat to my artistic director role. Although I did not announce this role to the composers in the for-Wards programme, I applied aspects of the shadow curator position to the shadow composer role. For example, through dialogue and discussion, I challenged the composer's proposals and hyperlocal methodological approaches. This was completed in the same way that a shadow member of parliament will scrutinise the function of politicians who are in power and propose alternative policies (Sacramento, Zeiske, 2010: 18). I sat with composers, listened to their workshop ideas and challenged aspects I felt needed greater consideration. For example, when working with composer Xhosa Cole, I was concerned about some of his workshop ideas when collaborating with a youth group who had hearing impediments. Through discussion and sharing of hyperlocal compositional methods research, I was able to support Cole in the refinement of the hyperlocal composing methods for his workshop.

The curation of the for-Wards programme meant the artistic partners were responsible for the selection of their composer and the community engagement in the district in which they worked. However, the shadow composer role was especially helpful as I found myself supporting most of the composers with outreach activity. This was because most artistic partners were unable to support composers with their hyperlocal composing workshops, some due to a lack of expertise, others due to limited capacity. The role helped me work alongside composers with a different dynamic to the artistic director role. I decided to play the shadow composer role when supporting composers with planning, reflecting on their composing workshop sessions and any other aspects they found challenging. If funding allowed, it would have been preferable to employ a composer, totally removed from the for-Wards programme but possessing a Birmingham connection, to fulfil the shadow composer role. If I were to develop large-scale music programmes such as for-Wards again, I would like to examine the shadow composer role further.

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