Simon Hewitt Jones - The Violin Blog

Feb

14

Q&A with Simon: Outreach and Education

Filed Under Mysterious Music | 

I just found an old Question & Answer session I did for a Live Music Now (LMN) newsletter a few months ago. So here’s a quick insight into what I do outside of the concert hall for LMN. As is the way with these things, these are more the journalist’s words than mine, but you’ll get the picture nonetheless!

So, what do you do for the organization?

I give a variety of performances and concerts, with pianist Daniel Swain. The events take place in venues such as hospitals and schools, and I have done some tours combining trips to schools and homes for older people. I was also involved in a lunchtime concert series in Newport and in the Welsh Millennium Centre. Otherwise, I have done community concerts in village halls, which are often reaching isolated areas. Sometimes this connects out to festivals as well.

What training have you received?

As part of the Fellowship Programme I did mentored performances, where LMN sends an experienced music leader along to advise you and work with you on developing presentation and workshop skills. We also receive extensive documentation and guidance for specific new venues and support on an ongoing basis from the branches.

What is the most memorable experience you’ve had on the scheme?

I think playing to audiences where people have profound disabilities and do not react in the way you might expect them to, but as the musician, you suddenly realise that they are responding, in their own way. For example, I played to an audience in Wales, of people with physical and learning disabilities. Some of them reacted vocally and you could really detect a change in their awareness and reactions in their movements as we performed. We also once played to a 13-year old girl who had previously been a violinist and had been struck down by a virus that had left her partially paralysed and in hospital. Our performance had such an impact - a momentary release from an extreme situation. [NOTE FROM SIMON: I have since learnt that after that day, the girl’s condition improved dramatically, during which time she received further visits from other performers. She is expected to make a significant recovery.]

What do you enjoy most about music outreach?

I think actually taking the performance aspect and grabbing people’s attention and seeing how they react. LMN gives us the freedom to experiment with our programmes. This is great as it gives the audience a taste of music that hasn’t been diluted. We’re simply presenting them with something on its own merit. People come with no preconceptions, no prejudices about the genre of music. This is particularly true for children – everything’s new and presented on an equal level, which is extremely liberating.

What are your plans for the future?

We’ll be working on increasing our range of performances over the next two-three years with LMN, putting together all sorts of programmes and recording MP3s for the internet – quite a diverse load of things.

Comments

One Response to “Q&A with Simon: Outreach and Education”

  1. PeterMcB on February 15th, 2007 1:31 pm

    Very impressive, Simon.

    I read an article a while back about community outreach by a string quartet in the USA, the Providence String Quartet. The article was by Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker magazine, and it’s accessible from the quartet’s pages, here.

    http://www.communitymusicworks.org/

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