YOUNG audiences throughout Scotland are receiving unprecedented access to World Music through an innovative new touring festival of performance, learning events and online activity.

The brainchild of educator and composer Stephen Deazley, the Love Music Festival is an exciting and ambitious new initiative, bringing some of the world’s finest musicians to Peebles, Kilmarnock, Glasgow, St Andrews, Shetland, Banchory, Stornoway and Inverness.

The Festival’s national touring programme features an astonishingly diverse range of music from Central and West Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Canada and the USA, providing the opportunity for live experience of new sounds together with a learning programme “designed to encourage curiosity and musical experimentation.”

Bulgarian vocal group the EVA Quartet

Engaging directly with young people aged 4-18, the Festival will also include a number of public events culminating in a family day at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness (13 November, 10am-4pm), featuring performances from all the festival artists.

While there are precedents of access for young people to Classical and Traditional Scottish Music, direct contact with a broader range of world music and sound experience has yet to be embedded in teaching, schools and communities. The Love Music Festival’s ethos of access to musical excellence from around the world utilises a multi media approach, providing multiple routes into the music and culture of incoming artists and new perspectives on familiar sounds. Festival Director Stephen Deazely explains:

“A key element that grew rather organically was the concept of offering young people a ‘festival experience’, not just a single performance. In terms of where we looked for musicians I was interested in both the natural draw of wonderful musicianship but also in trying to achieve an eclectic mix that would surprise and reinforce the grand scale of the festival’s ambitions to bring unfamiliar music, and by subterfuge inject mini-cultural shocks.

“There is a very simple, tried and tested way of breaking down barriers – it’s about contact, real human contact. This is done in part by our travelling team of intrepid animateurs, who will be touring all over the [eight festival] regions working in schools, but it’s also about bringing the music and musicians up close.

“I don’t accept that musicians, however great they are, need to maintain a mystique – that’s a purely pop invention, so simply getting close up to the musicians and bands will have enormous impact. At the end of the day musicians who are the best in the world will inspire no matter where they come from.”

Tuvan throat-singers Huun-Huur-Tu

A range of online resources through the Love Music Festival website for students, teachers, parents and the wider public, including creative classroom music, composition, internet and digital music projects and experiments with sonic art will compliment the performance programme and encourage dialogue between audiences and visiting artists.

The Love Music Festival Jukebox, a series of networked playlists, will enable people to explore, rate and tag the music of the festival artists and discover the music which most inspired them. In addition sound installations within venues will add to the interactive nature of the Festival experience.

The potential for individual musical discovery is part of the expansive nature of the festival, and access to free software Map Mixer through the festival website will enable new music to be created and shared online. Throughout September and October, Love Music Festival’s Multi Media Curator Yann Seznec will be leading workshops in schools for 14-18 year olds, recording, editing and uploading sounds into Map Mixer, an interactive sound bank which anyone can use to compose their own tracks. In addition to its own website, the festival will utilise Facebook, Twitter and the GLOW network to share skills, opinion and information in the lead up to performances.

Four festival performance days in each of the seven touring regions will target specific age groups; Green Pea, featuring Trio pour un petit pois (France) and Circus Invisible (UK) for ages 4-7, Sonic Harmonic, featuring Eva Quartet (Bulgaria), Mamadou Diabate (Mali) and Sväng (Finland); and Balkan Mash, featuring Creaking Tree String Quartet (Canada), Jonny Axelsson (Sweden) and Kolektif Istanbul (Turkey) for ages 8-13 and Electric Loops featuring Huun Huur Tu (Tuva), Oren Marshall and the Charming Transport Band (UK) and Hobbit (UK) for ages 14-18.

All festival regions large or small, urban or rural will have access to the same diverse programme of music and learning being delivered in partnership with local venues and authorities. In the Highlands and Islands, they are Eden Court Theatre and Highland Council; Shetland Arts Development Agency and Shetland Islands Council; and An Lanntair and Comhairle Nan Eilean Siar in The Western Isles.

“We wanted every performance to go everywhere, no excuses,” Deazley explained. “Being able to tour to rural communities as well as cities was always very important – that means programming only up to a certain scale of ensemble / band, which still allowed us to bring the whole festival programme to every venue.

“We are bringing musicians from Turkey, Sweden, Canada, Bulgaria, Tuva, UK, France, Finland, West and Central Africa; a beautiful music theatre work and the crazy world of Circus Invisible for younger audiences; the regal and intoxicating sound of the African harp, the Kora; singing quartets from Bulgaria and Tuva; Balkan dance rhythms and grooves from Kolektif Istanbul; the extraordinary harmonica virtuosi Sväng from Finland; Canada’s leading bluegrass string band; Beatboxers; Electric Tubas; percussionists from Sweden and Central Africa.”

Kora master Mamadou Diabate from Mali

Deazley then explained how local communities can get involved:

“We have been working with all the local education teams since the start of the year, putting together tours of workshops to schools. If your school isn’t involved there may still be places for students to come to the Love Music events. Get in touch with us and we can put you in touch with the key people in your area.

“Start with the website [see link below] – its all there, resources, jukebox, videos, tour dates, contact details, so get online. If you are at school get your GLOW account up and running – you can stay in contact with all our animateurs there, and parents can do this too. The web resources are free, there are lots of creative projects teachers can do themselves.”

It is hoped that the Love Music Festival will become a biennial event and expand to a UK wide project in 2012, ensuring long term, sustained access to a broad range of world musical experience for young people. The potential of the festival in terms of creative legacy is perhaps one of its most exciting elements. With few educational opportunities offering any quality of experimentation, the Festival is a unique event, providing access not just to performance but actively seeding creative process. Stephen Deazely described the value of this approach.”

“I go back to my own work as a composer. I approach my own music like having a set of interesting ingredients, and I have to find a way to make them work well together and still feel like they can present a bigger idea. It’s a bit like problem solving, which, when you’re in the process, is totally engrossing. By applying curiosity and an experimental attitude, and guided by your own aesthetic and instinctive judgment things work themselves out on their own.”

The scale of ambition for the Love Music Festival is inspired and encouraging, especially in the current economic climate. The festival’s aims to “broaden the range of music available to young people, deepen their understanding of music from other cultures and open up possibilities for children to engage with international artists and their work” represents a vision of sustained impact, appreciation of diversity and self discovery.

On the question of diversity, Deazley cites a parable about identity told to him by a Russian dancer friend:

“ONE (person) in a room does not exist. TWO (people) in a room exist because you can come together, and in coming together there is safety of a kind. THREE (people) in a room is more than ONE + TWO. When THREE are in a room there is more of a challenge. THREE can make different combinations of TWO + ONE. When there are THREE you suddenly know that you can be on your own, that you can be different.

“Okay, it’s more amusing in Russian! But diversity makes you understand more deeply who you are, and you can’t begin to make anything honest in a creative artistic context until you know who you are.”

The Love Music Festival Scotland runs from 1-13 November 2010.

© Georgina Coburn, 2010

Links

• Love Music Festival
• Stephen Deazley