Indian Music Project reaches out to Schools
In the spirit of the CETL’s inclusivity agenda, the Indian Music project has begun to extend its work beyond the university campus. In November 2007, we took the project out to Gosforth High School for a pair of workshops with a group of Year 11 GCSE students.
This helped the students cover an area of their curriculum in an exciting and very immediate way. In the first workshop, they were treated to a live demonstration of an Indian raga from our gurus Dr Vijay Rajput (vocal) and Shahbaz Hussain (tabla), accompanied by Prof. David Clarke on harmonium. The second workshop was led by Prof. Clarke who was joined by half a dozen students from Newcastle University and The Sage Gateshead, who are learning Indian music as part of the CETL project.
Equipped with multiple sets of tabla, the CETL students took the school students through some of the basics of Indian drumming techniques – literally a case of hands–on experience. The session ended with a ‘mini raga’ performance, which had the students singing in Sanskrit ‘saragam’ syllables.
Part of the thinking here is to encourage CETL students to develop their communication skills, and to expand the range of people they get to work with. It also involves them in the dissemination of the CETL’s work.
The venture was co-ordinated by Dr Felicity Laurence, leader of the CETL’s Music in Education project, and marks a new initiative which we hope to extend to more schools in the near future, so building on one of the project’s aims of ‘connecting communities’. To this end the project will also be contributing to a schools day being run in March 2008 by Newcastle University’s School of Modern Languages, as part of its Hefce–funded.
