The Music Education Podcast
Listen for authentic and challenging conversation on all things music ed. Brought to you by Charanga. Hosted and produced by Chris Woods of The Chris Woods Groove Orchestra.
The Music Education Podcast
Episode 42: 'Music Education in Prisons' Yve Riby-Williams
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In this episode Chris chats to Yve about her work in the criminal justice system.
Welcome back to the Music Education Podcast. I'm Chris of the Chris Woods Groove Orchestra. This podcast is brought to you by the Soundstorm Music Education Hub. And in this episode, I speak to Eve Rabby Williams about music education in prisons. Now I was inspired to have this conversation with Eve because I wanted an insight into music making and music workshops in the criminal justice system. And I thought it'd be really interesting for all music educators. Now this conversation delivers exactly that, but Eve also delivers so much more. We end up talking about limitless creativity, the alchemy of just creating more, the movement between acceptance or surrendering to the control part of your creativity. I mean, this really is one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking conversations in a podcast that I've ever had the pleasure of being a part of or listened to. I know you'll enjoy. Eve, thank you so much for joining me this afternoon. Can we start off with uh who you are and what you do?
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's a great question. So, my name's Eve Rebe Williams. I am a performing singer and songwriter. Um, but a good amount of what I do um is community workshop leading with a specific focus with the criminal justice system. Um, and I think uh that's what we're gonna talk about today.
SPEAKER_00In summary, fantastic musician who also implements musicalness in prisons. I should hope so. Okay. How how did you I I g I guess just a a great point to go with straight away is actually how you sort of your journey to end up there, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so um interestingly, I I I studied jazz at the Guild Hall um for my undergrad. I did that for four years, um, and whilst I was there, I worked with loads of different people and I got a a chance to do lots of different kinds of teaching. Um, and I ended up teaching in a band called the Boxettes. Um, I ended up being in this band and and doing a lot of my uh sort of leading work, tutorial work, um, in this project, aside from touring and gigging um with them. And actually, when we came towards the end of the span cycle, when we were both we were all thinking about um becoming solo artists or pursuing different things musically, um another friend of mine approached me, um, a producer, and we started working on sort of solo material. And whilst we were talking about this, he sort of talked to me about the other work that he did. Um, and he said that he'd been doing for for about eight years by that point. He'd been really involved with a company called Obra Music, and they had been writing music with young offenders in prisons, and it really sparked sort of like an interest in me because I thought like this is a really interesting place um to kind of like access musicality, but also um to access sort of like novelness in people because I feel like that's one of the things I really love about working with children, and I really wanted to know if that was true of um a criminal justice setting, like a prison setting.
SPEAKER_00What do you mean by novelness like this? Novelness just people being unique.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, interesting. I think it's that it's when people do not have pre-conceptions about how to approach a task or creativity, and so like I really do think real genius is bred from ingenious when you don't have the thing that you would usually use, and you invent something new out of necessity, something really beautiful can happen. And children are at that stage. Part of the reason why children child's play seems so incredible is that with very little resources, the imagination of children can create such amazing things. I just spent the afternoon with my goddaughter, and she has an obsession with ice cream, so she went around the park picking twigs and just uh you know ascribing different kinds of ice cream flavours to it and offering it to people in the park. And I just thought, how amazing that like she doesn't need to see that, she doesn't need to have a certain kind of play already established before she starts exploring what her mind can do and enjoying that. Um, and in the same way, I've really enjoyed working with young people when they free themselves from the prescription of how things should sound or how you should approach something. And so I wonder whether in a setting like uh prison where the resources are a lot lower, whether that gives people an opportunity to be more ingenious, to dig deep and find interesting ways to play and connect with music, because maybe the things we expect to come across in the average classroom or outside, you know, YouTube and whatnot, those things aren't available to them. So I was really interested in kind of working in that space. And um the prison that uh Alvin worked in this youth offenders um facility ended up becoming a men's prison that same year, and when it became a men's prison, they wanted to to change the um the vision of the work that happened there, and so Alvin, knowing that I was really interested, he asked the producer at the time if um, you know, the project producer, if if he if, you know, since she didn't have a singer on that gig, um, if it would be a thing for me to come and try it out and see see what I think. And I've been on it for eight years since, seven, eight years since. So it was it was like an immediate fit for me. I think it was it was interesting because I did get to this space, and one thing I realized was in abundance is um an ingenious energy just below the surface, but a very, very thick layer of anxiety and vulnerability, and that we just needed to pick that apart a little bit, and underneath that was a wealth of creativity, and that when you access that recess of creativity for people, you open possibility for so many more things than just music, and that really stuck with me. So I kind of continued, I really wanted to grow that inquiry for myself, but also I felt like there was definitely some space and some value in that work there that I wanted to really kind of like connect with and and grow.
SPEAKER_00There's there's so much awesome stuff in there. Before we go down any other route, I think people listening to this would actually just love to know in almost quite practical terms what it is that you you do in these situations.
SPEAKER_01Do you want to of course so like I'm I'm a singer by trade um and I play a bit of piano, um, but I like to go into a prison with a guitarist, just me and a guitarist, um, and just sit down with people and and start to think about how we can start making music. So when I first started, there was this idea that like, oh, what we need is a proper sing song. I'm going to arrange some tunes in what seemingly to me is easy three-part harmony, and we're all just gonna have a really good time hearing our voices. And when I got there, I realized actually, A, three-part harmony is easy for no one, and that's rubbish. I don't know where I got that idea from, and B, um using your voice is your body, it's your immediate resource, but accessing it is not a thing that is natural in the West. We don't use our voices, we don't connect with our bodies in that way, and so I realized like part of the problem we have is this great sense of comparison. So I keep bringing in tunes that were like pop tunes and be like, let's try this out. And people would find it hard to resonate with those songs, you know, it could be quite hit and miss. And I realized the most important thing, the thing that works really well, is writing music because we can basically create a song from scratch that doesn't exist, using words that are completely accessible and applicable to the people in the room, using melodies that are accessible and applicable to the people in the room. And no one has ever sung it before, so there's no one to compare yourself to, which became a space to write this music. So we we would we do write really affirming songs and we write them as a big group. Um, sometimes an individual brings things in, but we would mostly write these things as a big group. So I guess the the the mutation that I currently run is essentially going into a space um bi-weekly for a few months and giving people different ideas and starting points um to kind of write songs from scratch, making sure that we are valuing how anxious and vulnerable people might be in that space. So always making space for being human and then using that as our access point into making songs. And I will sing and people will sing in the room, and we have a guitarist because I think guitars are really light on their feet, they feel portable and they feel really soft, soft on the ear, like soft on the eyes, not a huge deal. And there are other guitarists in the prison as well, so it means people can kind of like find a thing to join in with, and we focus on writing songs. Um, in the past, after a term of doing this kind of activity, we would put on a gig and uh we would we would basically spend a week polishing the songs that we'd created in the term, and we'd put on a concert, and members of the public would be allowed to come in and they get locked in with us in the prison, and we perform these wonderful songs and put on a proper show, and that'd be like a full sort of rotation of things, and that would happen twice a year. We recently kind of changed it a bit, so now we've been doing the recording project projects because since COVID things have really changed, so still trying to find our feet with what the new thing is. Um, but yes, on a week-to-week basis, I'd go in with a guitarist, we'd sit down with some people, and we'd start this process of getting comfortable with each other in the room, starting with the skills and the levels at which people are at, um, discussing the things that people might want to write, finding common ground, finding uh using creativity tactics to just loosen up a little bit and uh and then and just form parts of songs until we have what we need for the next thing.
SPEAKER_00That's wonderful. Wonderful to hear about that sort of using originality as a way of making people feel welcome, I suppose. Quite similar to maybe what lots of people do with young people as well. I suppose similar anxieties and insecurities in many respects.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Um, there is there is really, if anything, if I've been taught anything, there seems to be no difference between humans. Like the things that plague humans are just the things that plague humans. Circumstances can be quite wildly different, but this thing about wanting to look not wanting to look silly or feeling um you know having a hard day, or you know, feeling like you know, someone has said something about your voice or your thing that you play and it's really stuck with you, a negative comment, and that's you know, really remained, or knowing that other people can read really well and and knowing your reading age is actually super low, so then saying, Well, that's a thing I can't do, or learning something out of survival. So, um, I've had a couple of guys in my project who are not native English speakers but have been prison long enough that they've learned to speak English, and so the language that they speak, that that spoken English is totally comprehensible, but it is not the same as written English, and so they can't write anything, but they they can speak it. Meanwhile, their own languages have they've not been using them very often, and so those languages don't get um they don't get written either, so you're in this halfway house where you can't uh you can't write down your language, but you also can't write down English, which is really intense.
SPEAKER_00With that in mind, then of essentially this conversation just talking about how people even though that the situations might be quite extreme, like a prison, which I would regard as a extreme situation, I'm sure people in prison see it as pretty extreme too. So it's like but that it's it's the same uh the suffering from the same challenges, and you're having to deal with the same sort of challenges, even with the like reading, writing, or maybe you could relate that to those who are reading music or not reading music or understanding what a chord is or a harmony. So keeping that sort of comparison there, I know a lot of people will be following uh a sort of a narrative that's really present for all of us, kind of to do with fairness, I suppose, and people's sense of fairness as well. And that idea of very recently in a uh a podcast we did was about funding within schools, sort of a pound for per pupil for music, but then uh obviously immediately people seeing that as unfair or unjust, but then I know a part of a narrative will then say, Well, why on earth is is that there in prison?
SPEAKER_01What do you what do you say to that narrative if you're well it's a complicated it is a complicated thing, but I also think as just as generally as human beings, we need to investigate how we see music because for me as a practitioner, music is a communic communicative tool, it's a a way of speaking and connecting and flushing loose um old ideas and creating space for new ones and new ways of thinking. So, as a practice, it's a very necessary way of moving through the world and connecting with the world. But music is seen as a luxury, an enjoyment, an entertainment thing. And if you consider it to be a thing about entertainment and pleasure, then it's like why on earth are we not giving our children pleasure, but we're prepared to create this pleasure or this entertainment for someone who is in a prison. And when we think about it like that, then then yeah, the answer seems obvious to us that then, well, that's a place to skim it and give it to young people, give it to children. But actually, we need to think about how we handle um incarcerated people in this country, and part of the way that we we are fundamentally handling that situation is rehabilitation. We expect that someone who has done a 25-year sentence will eventually regain their freedom and rejoin society. If we treat them like an animal and we don't give them anything to work with, they will end up being released back into society with all those ideas. The likelihood is they're going to repeat those ideas. It is very difficult to rise above a certain treatment if you know that that's all you're entitled to for the rest of your life, regardless of whether you're good or bad. So we need to think about music education and creativity as a way of accessing warmer, more constructive points of positivity and people who don't have as many opportunities or access points and use that as a way of connecting those people with an opportunity for a better, a better behaviour record, a better life, a better opportunity in life. Because if someone finds that there is something positive about themselves, if they can find a way of processing complex things when they're independent and away from a situation or an institution that um basically takes care of whether well or or poorly, which is also debatable, but takes care of your everyday needs, where you sleep, what you eat, who you see, where you go. When you're independent, if you have something positive to hang on to, your ability to survive inside of that positive mentality is much higher than it would be if you were still holding on to something so negative, so painful, as like the disparity of not being given any more opportunities, if we cut you off in life. I don't think personally for me, if we're not gonna be a society that welcomes corporal punishment, we don't have the death sentence here, we believe in life after prison, then we need to be prepared to sew into better so that the lives those people live are better because they'll become part of our lives, and we also deserve better. And that's my feeling on that.
SPEAKER_00It's pretty it's pretty simplistic almost, isn't it? It's just it's it's it's a no-brainer to to do it. But then do you find you experience I don't know, when when you speak to people about it, do you find that overwhelmingly generally people are oh that's amazing, isn't that great? You're rehabilitating people.
SPEAKER_01Interestingly, you know, I think people are half and half. Some people say, Oh, you've got such a good heart, I could never do a thing like that. That sounds really interesting, or that's amazing. And other people are like, honestly, the idea of how little the arts get credence in the rest of society makes this a bit of a farce for me, you know, like that's really tough. Um, and I understand both of those things, but I think that what's really important is always in investigating value from the point of how constructive a thing can be. So, really, just like those of us who manage to procure funding to do this kind of work in the criminal justice system, the same reasons why it's so useful and important for the most part apply to the tactile mental um mental activity of children and young people. And we should be fighting for the rights for young people to have access to uh curriculums that really encourage creativity in a big way, and that should be everybody's fight. It's easy to see something that you think ought to be somewhere else, but if we're honest, if money wasn't spent on the criminal justice system, it wouldn't end up in the education system, and I think that's that's it's it's it's ne the the dichotomy is never that clean, you know, the the paradigm's never that smooth. So um, yeah, I think people are often really uh taken by that, and and I'm always saying, you know, if someone if we say to someone ten years you're going to be punished for 10 years, what do we expect to happen after they've been punished? What do we want? What do we hope for that person? What do we hope for ourselves when that person rejoins our streets? What do we what do we need? And if we all looked a little bit deeper, you know, the satisfaction of just punishing people ebbs away, and we realise that it it's us that also uh suffer. So let's give them something. Let's let's give them something. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting as well, isn't it? Essentially prison forcing someone to be imprisoned, imprisoning is a is a violent thing, and obviously in this country we do that a lot to people who are not violent as well. Uh and then it's sort of so do you find in the music that you do, do you find that there's a obviously there's a cathartic element to it, but is there a sort of uh channeling and letting go of being in that violent situation for people coming out in the music and stuff like that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's one of those really important things, even let even less than just in the music, it's in the uh culture and the the environment that you cultivate with the people you're with. One of the things that I hear a lot of, which I I really am happy to hear, but it also makes me sad. Um, are um participants saying to me, um, you know, I've been here for a week or I've done a few of these, and the thing that I really love most um is that I feel so human and I feel like I've been treated like a human being, and it takes a lot for people to treat you like a human being in this circumstance, and uh I think that's really sad. As a reflection back to society, I think that's really um painful. Um so there's most definitely a a sort of a processing of the environment, a processing of um the things that have happened, whether that's the things that the person is responsible for or things that have happened as a result of what's happened, or even you know, a lot of the men that I've met, I'd say essentially nearly all of them, have had very disparate socioeconomic um situations before they ended up in. Situation they are in. So a lot of the choices that they have made have been poor choices, but they haven't had a lot of opportunity. Yeah, there have not been other alternatives. So sometimes part of the music, part of the process is also creating hope that there haven't been the best of circumstances for you or in it so far, but you know, there is something here in your ability to connect with a new thing, whether that this is your first time, and uh you you've not got a very long-standing relationship with playing music, or you actually happen to be pretty good at it, and there are opportunities and jobs and different things that you could pursue or connect with to keep keep this distilled inside you to connect you with your ability to know you can do more that this life can can give you more. There is certainly a lot of that available in these these projects. For me, the most important thing, I don't really go there to be like, I'm gonna change your life. I go into that space to just to remind people you are so much more than you think you are. You're so much more than you have been told you are. You're capable of so much more, you're capable of real real movement and real change. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I mean that in itself as a a statement feels like a beautiful message to be in any music education setting, anyway, isn't it? Do you f do you find that when because you work with young people as well? And so do you find that then these skills that you learn there, these sort of philosophies and changes in perspective, you then go and work with you know, a a little Jimmy um who's yeah six years old and bashing away on a guitar and it's it's exactly the same, the principles are the same.
SPEAKER_01No matter where I'm working, the feeling I want to leave you with is that you are so much more than maybe you thought you were just ten minutes ago or half an hour ago, and you must keep like believing in your own expansion. There is so much expanse inside you, and you can just keep going like a fractal in both directions if we kept going inwards. There's so many amazing things, but if you just kept going outwards, there'd just be more and more. There's no limit to what you can touch if you allow yourself.
SPEAKER_00Whoa, this is cool. Talking about fractals and limitless possibilities and oh cool, let's let's talk about that more then. That's cool. I like that. I like that. I that personally, I guess that that's a new thing for me in creativity of realizing limitlessness. Interestingly, in in prisons, you're in a particularly limited situation, aren't you? But then I suppose from a creative perspective.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think that like I think that wherever you are, you are limited by a set of parameters. They may look very big. If I mean, if if we if we think conceptually, in a prison, we're in a very specific room, and we can't walk out of that room without certain permissions. But when I go out from that room and I'm in my life, and I go out, I can walk right to the edge of the UK, um, and then I've got a limit there. There's a boundary. I can't I can't just cross that water easily. But even if I could just swim away, I'd need permission to end up in another place. So we are all boundried in one way or another, and so what's really amazing is that like physically boundaries exist for us, but the ability to like use our mind to access more or create more, the alchemy of creating more exists inside of all of us. We are that fractal thing is really important. As as physicists go further in to work out what the smallest denominator of matter is, they seem to be splitting things, and the more sophisticated their equipment gets, the more things are somehow able to be split again and again, quarks into semi-quarks, into demi-quarks, into more and more there are more and more particles that we couldn't possibly imagine. And we have the same thing as we try to to see the bigger picture as we come out from the planet and we see galaxies and we start to see um systems and and and the universe, and we're realizing this may well be a multiverse, there may be more of those. I'm pretty certain if we go in both directions, things uh extrapolate infinitely. And how beautiful an idea for us as sentient beings to think that there is a way of accessing that limitlessness, that just because we see time in a very linear way doesn't mean that's the only dimension that time or ability exists, and to see that as an echo to ourselves, that more is possible. It's a very western thing to have a scarcity mentality because without it there could not be haves and have nots, you know, and that's how we've built the capitalism that underpins our societies, tells us that that's the way things ought to be. But there are many other communities, many other ways of living in the world where things are cyclical, everything feeds into everything. There's a real understanding that we're not observing nature, but we're of it, you know, and the same thing of anything. The more we accept and and expect that we intertwine with each other and that things are limitless, that they do go in both directions, the more access we have to to ourselves and and the parts of ourselves we don't even know are there yet. And maybe they're not there, maybe we're creating them, but there is a limitless to what we're capable of connecting with, dreaming of, feeling, experiencing. And it's amazing when we can tap into that connectivity with each other in a way that reminds us there is hope and we can do more, and life doesn't have to look just one way, you don't have to be just a statistic. You're capable of being so much more than that, and it doesn't matter where you are, boundaries or not, we can all access something like that.
SPEAKER_00And you think that's through music?
SPEAKER_01I think art and music is a perfect space for that because it's one of these rare places where something that is seemingly unconnected to another thing can create something that more than one person feels. We can hear, you know, I play minor chords to very small children and they can tell me that those feel sad. There's nothing in the mathematics necessarily of those chords that tells them before they understand how to read music that that's sad, and yet there's a resonance for them that makes so much sense. I will play the same piece to adults in their 40s and their 50s, and they will also resonate with that sadness, whether they're learned or not. And there is something in that that there is a there can be uh a picture, you can see a picture of a sun and not confuse it for the sun, but also have it can it can connect you with feelings and emotions and things that you have experienced in your life or things you want to experience. That ability for art to stand in place as a key, like a lock-and-key mechanism to help us access other things that feel really tangible for us is amazing, and music is unique in that it's an extension of language. You and I are speaking to each other in English, but in theory, this could be complete gibberish to a set of whales or a set of mountain ghosts, it could be complete gib gibberish, but we understand each other enough to just not just comprehend but to profoundly connect with some very outlandish ideas, or or you know, I'm describing a place to you, and you can see it in your mind's eye from gibberish that I'm saying to you. And what's amazing about language is that we take uh music even is that we take a sort of 2D language and we make that really 3D, we we add tone to it, we add texture, and it's it's like hyper-realizing all the colours of speech, and that's something that we can all kind of connect with singing specifically, but but notes and and music. So for sure, for me, obviously it's my chosen medium, so I'm very biased, but um uh it I think that it it has a very very profound ability to to access these things.
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SPEAKER_00Well that was profound, dude. That was um that was beautiful, thank you. Thanks. Um that's spot on, that's what I need on a well, I I've got no idea what day it is actually. Is it Thursday? Um that's brilliant. So uh yeah, just the the the the idea of limits being a kind of um a a construct that isn't really real. What about uh something I'm I've been toying with recently within the sort of creative process is finding I've started to notice that I'm on like a a spectrum between what I'd describe as acceptance at one end, it sounds very sort of um you know post-counselling session. Possibly is, but acceptance on one hand and control on the other, and I kind of feel that when I'm making stuff, I'm always flitting over there, like oh super, trying to control everything, trying to get and then okay, and then I go back to this acceptance place, and then it's the magic starts to happen, but then I have to go back over to the control bit and control things again to shape it, and then I can just go with the flow with it. Do you find going back to the the maybe the prison situation again, and that sort of because that obviously the idea of acceptance and control is like the two massive themes there, and within creativity? Go on.
SPEAKER_01Um no, that's a really excellent thing, and I too have two places that I flip between. One of them is a sort of like a sort of complete freedom, and I don't know sometimes I don't even know how find myself there, and then the other place is this place of of like complete ma what what I consider to call mastery, like I know what's gonna happen, control, but weirdly, that control place, if I'm very honest, is never quite as satisfying as the other place. I just I for ages I've thought I don't quite know how to get to that other place, and it's the names I have also been calling them acceptance and control, but actually, um one of them is is is kind of like control, and or or it's like it's it's led by me, it's like a a led collaboration, so that's me really having a sense of where things are, and the other one I've renamed it, and I renamed it surrender, which is actually really hard, but makes more sense. It's that there is something in I might not know, but when I get there and I'm enjoying it, I will gain knowing, and in that moment of knowing, I might not keep what I learn there for a moment, I might just enjoy it for a moment and it might go. And I've been really trying to make sense of this space, surrender. Um, and it's the thing that my goddaughter was doing so well today, she doesn't know if there are going to be sticks, she doesn't even know if anyone's going to speak to her, she doesn't know. She doesn't know but she doesn't care, and it's she has no ego about holding on to the knowledge that lives there or being able to control the entire game from over here. She's so inquisitive that the inquiry alone is the only thing that she's interested in, so she has mastered surrender. She goes, and because of that, every time she plays that game, it's wonderful, and it's so wonderful, she allows the information, how wonderful it is, to pass through her so that she might even go there again naively and enjoy it again. And I think as adults, for some reason, we retain this idea that to get better at something, you must, you know, economise everything that you learn, shave it down to its best bits, and that's what mastery looks like. But true mastery is the ability to surrender and allow anything to look like anything, and so the thing I've learned, if anything, I think my musicality and my musicianship has grown exponentially over the last seven years, far more than it ever did my time in my band, far more than it ever did in my time at Conservatoire. It's grown by leading people into a space where they surrender, where I take their lead and also surrender, and that is a really powerful thing, really powerful thing.
SPEAKER_00So you re you think when you're doing those workshops and you that's part of the deal is just accepting this goes where it's yes, all of us we're gonna we're gonna relax.
SPEAKER_01It's part of the things we say at the top, like we're gonna relax and we're just gonna see, we're just gonna see what's in the room. Let's see where we go. And I have complete, complete uh confidence that as we take ourselves out we will see something we've not seen before. And if that's the only thing that constitutes us being exciting or new or interesting, then that's all but guaranteed. So we can surrender, we can let go. And if I say we can do it, then we're all gonna give it a go. But also, I see people giving it a go, and I understand that that principle is absolutely profoundly important in the way that I do things, and so it's it's an amazing sort of figure of eight where this group feeds my creativity and I feed their creativity and they feed my practice and I feed their practice, and it's really it's really interesting, really beautiful.
SPEAKER_00How how how does that surrender uh interact with the aims of a project? So I'm thinking about if I'm thinking about classroom teachers in the sense of okay, let's just surrender with this process, and then the head teachers go, um, you you need to not sound rubbish at assembly later, you know what I mean? And surely that in a in a in a prison is that the same?
SPEAKER_01So I like to I think you're it is the same in a prison and in a classroom, it's the same, you know. It the surrendering is about working with what you've got, and I think that like I like to liken this process to swimming. When I am trying to get to the other side very quickly, I turn into solid. I like work really hard to cut through this water, but when I'm really fluent in the water, I remember the fact that my body is mainly made of water, it might not look like uh a bottle of Evion, but I'm also made of water and I settle in and and the water and I we resonate as one thing. I become I become fluid and I move with those things. That's not to say that if I can't swim very well, I don't use a float or you know, sit on a small raft with a paddle. And I just think the important thing is is scaffolding the swimming. If if swimming is impossible, then we are going to need a paddle board to kind of feel where the water moves with what we are. If we're in a school or I'm in a space where people have no, you know, sometimes I'm working with some guys and they're essentially tone deaf. That's like not available, the the notes are not available, so we've got to work differently. I need to write a very, very simple chord sequence where we can all pick based on the the fundamentals, the happy and the sad, and sometimes I want to use diminished things or augmented things, so we talk about being delirious or being depressive, so we get that spectrum of happy and sad. We can definitely all agree and extend, and we can pick chords from that, and then we just think about where our voices sit naturally. So sometimes people make notes that are nonsensical notes, but that's the bottom of someone's range, and it turns out it's the bottom of lots of people's range. Well, that's going to be the key, then, because that's the bottom of where we can reach, and we can all feel that resonance in our bodies, so we can call that the root, we feel rooted in that position. So sometimes it's about extending the language and the the sort of nature of what we have to work with to make a thing happen. A bit like um if all our bodies, if if we imagine each of our voices is like an oboe, and uh you get to carve that oboe out of a branch of a tree, you can't predict how the branch of that tree is going to grow, but you've got to cut a pipe out of it, so you've got to work with that wood and the way that it's grown to get the best sound and the best anything out of it, even if it doesn't look like a standard oboe. It's the name's not the thing that matters, it's it's the resonance and it's that fit-for-purposeness that it has by already being what it is in nature, and the same thing can be true of voices and people and musicality. Let's not try to turn you all into Usher or Frank Sinatra, let's not try to turn you into Jimi Hendrix. Let's work with what you have, let's work with what you know, let's think about the nature of what your voice already does when you laugh, the tone you hit with your voice when you laugh. That's something you resonate with all the time, and it's more or less the same every time. So let's let's think of that one thing that makes you laugh, that one dad's joke that you're forever telling everyone. Let's hear you laugh and let's all hold that space, and that becomes part of our natural resonance. Let's use that to to to to pick the key to to connect with the sounds of things. Um yeah, let's let's basically use your nature to to access music.
SPEAKER_00Brilliant done. Thank you so much. Oh what? The whole thing done. That's just perfect. It's just a beautiful um way to uh end things. Although I am now gonna be really s self-conscious every time I laugh and look for that number what I'm hitting. But that's amazing. I love it. That's just such a uh yeah, it's weird. Thank you so much. Complete pleasure. It's a pleasure.
SPEAKER_01Oh god, I could talk about this forever. But yeah, complete pleasure. It's interesting because there are some really amazing things happening in the criminal justice system right now in terms of the kinds of work that's coming out. There are different um agencies all trying various things and learning so much from the isolation of lockdown, which gave all of us a chance, a unique opportunity, particularly as practitioners, to emulate what it's like to not have access and to be isolated. And so, from that new understanding, very new and interesting products are coming up. And for Britain Peers Arts, we're actually hosting some think tanks to really discuss what do we want, what what what do what was the future of this work when it's joined up, when different agencies are talking to each other and connecting with each other? What does that look like when it's well held? And we what what how what are the questions? What are the things that need answering, and how do we spend the next 20 years um building that, creating that? So it's a really exciting time actually for this kind of work. Interesting things are are happening.
SPEAKER_00Good to hear. And and actually, okay, one last question then. So how uh widely does amazing music stuff happen in the prison system as a whole?
SPEAKER_01Is it because you're working on I work in Suffolk and I only work in one at the moment. Um there's potential to reach others, and my prison is next to another prison that historically had um different kinds of choral work in there. What I'm hearing is that there are there are certainly um the Irene Taylor Trust are doing some incredible things. They've got uh series where they go in and do practical music. Um there's a lullaby project, which Irene Taylor Trust have been involved in, the RPO have even been involved in this, and that project's about um uh participants writing lullabies and those being scored by um with orchestra and them being reformed and they can sing them so that they have something they can sing to their children, share with their children, um, which is a beautiful project.
SPEAKER_00There's that is and also heartbreaking at the same time, right?
SPEAKER_01But also that thing of like the beauty of of music, like my my both of my parents have like my dad's in his 70s now, but my mum's she's in her 60s, and when they both turned 60, they're five years apart, I wrote them a song. I wrote them each a song, and uh I never write songs for anyone really. Um not a personal song about one person. But what's interesting is that when they listen to that music, it spans all of time, it connects them with memories and things that they've told me, people that I don't even know, it connects them with me, it connects them with like the amount of time that they've spent, the vulnerability of realizing you're nearer the end than you were at the beginning, and so many things are accessed, and all of those things are beautiful, poignant, but beautiful. And I think there's something in this lullaby project where there is something that's born out of someone's heart, even if they're not a composer, even if they're not they don't consider themselves a musician or a singer, there is something that they want to put out a love, a connection that they want to give their children, and that can only be fully felt. There's no way for that to not resonate in the most um profound way. And although it's like, oh, you're not physically here, there is a potency in connecting through a lullaby that can only that that resonance can't be replicated anywhere else. Even physical touch doesn't necessarily replace this profound resonance. And if you think about the way that DNA works, someone has written something with their intonation, with their sense of self to resonate to a piece of themselves most likely is 50% of them. There is a sort of profound resonance that may well be happening there that really does span beyond just the tangibility of even touch and and space and time. So I think that it is heartbreaking, but I also think it's so incredibly beautiful and and necessary and rejuvenating. Um there's another project where um participants write stories for their children and they narrate them, and then this is set up with more music, so it's like a live story, and children get to hear, get to hear this music and and and the stories. Um and there's all these, it's basically just a lot of interesting material and things being generated from this need for communication, for this need for spanning beyond just yourself. And I think those are the true principles of music. Community. It's a weird thing in the West that we have at some point something happens, and we all basically um have an only star in the sky syndrome. The only thing that music is really great for for some reason is a spectacle. We want to look up and see a shooting comet, but in reality, it's more like the night sky. There are many met there should be many participants, listeners, uh contributors. Music is a was a way of us passing on stories and information and and connection with each other. So community is the heart of music. When we teach that, when we give that, particularly in these really disparate settings, we kind of rejuvenate that very, very ancient nature in ourselves that music is for all of us because we we resonate together. So it's amazing to see so many interesting projects approaching this idea of resonating together or resonating across a profound space in their own way.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
SPEAKER_01A pleasure.