Sixth Week

Hi!

Due to an outbreak of chickenpox, it was a quiet week at the Kindergarten in Srebrenica this week, with only three children in the workshop. Nevertheless, Toni led a fun-packed 45minutes beginning with our weekly ‘Dobar dan’ (good day) song and followed by lots of short musical games and activities encouraging the children to sing, feel a pulse, and practise their motor skills.

Dobar dan, Dobar dan,
Dobro došli,
Mi pjevamo i sviramo,
Sad zajedno svi.

[Good day, good day,


Welcome everyone,
We sing and we play,
Altogether now.]

It was lovely to see familiar faces again at the Potočari workshop this week: the children now know a large repertoire of songs and in future sessions we can now plan to build on some of the composition work from previous workshops. We began this week’s session with some physical and vocal warm-ups. Toni led a warm-up which involved a call-and-response chant that was then repeated in different voices (loud, soft, singing etc). It was particularly interesting to see the children singing quietly during this warm-up and I think we will push them to sing with different dynamics in future sessions.

During the rest of the session, favourite songs such as Abutange Vu and Tingaleo were interspersed with focus activities and we also taught them a new song called Tekele Lomeria, which contains extremes of dynamics as the singing gets quieter and quieter before suddenly shouting at the end.

Tekele lomeria a in gayeya,
Tekele lomeria a in gayeya,
Aa, aa, in gayeya,
Mm, mm, in gayeya,
HA!!

The music section, under Toni’s guidance, continued to work on the music for the monster scene. This week the children thought about how they wanted to end the piece, and decided that the Dundun should stop, leaving only the djembe and darbuka, and then all rhythms should slowly fade out. We were also able to talk with Jana who leads the dance section and we have organised to combine the music and dance section rehearsal next week which will be very useful.

Unfortunately the majority of the children who attend the workshops in Skelani were watching their friends in a football match this week and so numbers were depleted (only three children). I hope that this was just a one-off occurrence and that next week things will be back to normal. We had planned to spend the session composing with the children, writing the song that the pirates will sing in the show. However, one of the girls had brought with her the lyrics to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face and so an impromptu session was spent arranging this popular hit for percussion, guitar and keyboard.

A few weeks ago, I went with Toni to his nephew’s kindergarten in Sarajevo (Sv Obitelj) and we led a music workshop with the kids there. The session lasted an hour and a half and about 60 children attended! We played lots of musical games and sang lots of songs with the children who were very enthusiastic and remained energetic and engaged throughout the long session. We were even able to do a small composing activity with them where the children drew shapes on a large piece of paper, coloured them in and then used this as a graphical score to conduct the rest of the group. It was a great experience for me to work with such a large number of children and I hope to return with Toni to the kindergarten in the following weeks.

Fifth Week

Lewis and I returned to the school in Dobrinja this week for two workshops on Monday and Tuesday. Again, the groups we worked with were very enthusiastic and a lot of fun was had by everyone. After physical and vocal warm-ups we encouraged the kids to do a lot of singing. We taught them Ogendawa, a Ugandan song the title/lyrics of which translate as 'Where are you going?' or 'Gdje idiš?' in Bosnian. We also introduced them to the morski konj song from our workshop in Skelani last week. We added rhythms, played by the kids on small percussion, to the latter. We gave the rhythms accompanying Bosnian phrases which the kids could repeat whilst playing the instruments and we found this to be a successful method of making relatively complex rhythmic patterns easier to learn and remember.

In Srebrenica this week the Kindergarten session was once again very successful. Toni seems to have a limitless repetoire of fun and engaging musical games which stimulate the children's motor and memory skills as well as promoting their musicality.

Potočari was far more productive this week. We worked with a smaller group, of more familiar faces, and did a non stop programme of energetic musical games, focus/listening exercises and singing. We taught the group two new songs in Bosnian - Tingaleo (from the Carribean) and Abetange Vu (from Africa) which the children greatly enjoyed. This group can be very hyperactive, but we were pleased that generally the children listened very well this week, responding particularly well to a focus game we made up. In this the children passed percussion instruments (shakers, bells etc.) round a circle in time to a medley of waltzes from around the world(!) played by Lewis and I. When the music stopped they had to stop passing and make their instruments completely silent. We wouldn't resume playing until there was complete silence. They improved markedly in the short space of time it took to play this game.

The music theatre workshop went ahead much like last week, this time with three boys instead of two. We worked on developing and practising the music for the monster scene, as described last week.


In Skelani we reprised the Brazilian song from last week, with added rhythms, and also taught them Ogendawa, as in Dobrinja. Our main activity this week was a compositional task in which two groups selected themes and musical concepts from a choice of mystery cards. They had to follow the instructions given on these cards (e.g. 'There arose a great storm...', 'add oboe', 'start loud and get quieter') in order to make up and perform a short piece of music. The idea was to get the kids to invent the music themselves with minimal direction from us, but using the instructions as compositional guides. This went well with both groups guessing/discussing the themes of each other's music.

Fourth Week

The kindergarten workshop closely followed last week's format, which Toni (who leads this workshop) and ourselves felt worked very well. So we sang, danced and played lots of musical games throughout an energetic 45 minutes.

Something that has been slightly problematic thus far in our Potočari sessions is that each week we are not sure which children to expect. There are new kids (of varying ages) every session, and there seems never to be any teachers in the school building. This week in particular there were several older kids, and many of the keen younger ones were not there. We had planned further song-writing and percussion activities, building on the work started last week, but this did not go to plan. We tried, instead, to do whole group percussion work, but many of the new, older kids were quite uninterested and dismissive, to the point that many of them left early (much to our dismay). This was quite off-putting for the younger members of the group (who have attended previous sessions). We suspect that many of these older kids were not who the school had intended to take part in the workshops, but rather they just happened to outside the school when we arrived. As there were no teachers around, we weren't able to discuss this with them, but we hope that Amir may be able to contact the school on our behalf regarding this.

Later that day we had a successful music theatre rehearsal. Toni, who is in charge of the music section for the Christmas show, decided that, despite there being only two boys who have ever attended a rehearsal, this week we should go full steam ahead and start putting together the music for the show. It proved to be a very fruitful workshop, with the two boys directing the ensemble (me on keyboard and everyone else on drums) as they built up music to accompany a scene featuring a terrifying sea-monster! Their drumming skills also continue to improve, as Toni is very thorough in his teaching.

On Thursday in Skelani we continued with our hand percussion work - putting some rhythms together with a fun Brazilian song about a seahorse (or morski konj in Bosnian).

Daleko na moru
Valovi igrau
Morski konj pliva
Traži gdje je riva
Morski konj je zgodan
Morski konj je miran
Morski konj je divan
To je morski konj!


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The beast song from Potočari.

Third Week

Hello!

On the Wednesday of our third week of workshops, things went in general very well. Our first session of the day, in the kindergarten, was full of fun and happiness - we sang songs together (including the "Beauty" song composed last week) and played games involving a lot of music and movement. It seems the little boys and girls really love to dance, and they responded especially well to some Scottish ceilidh tunes which Hannah and I played to round off our activities (on the viola and melodica, respectively).

Our second session of the day was, as usual, in the Potočari school. After some physical and vocal warm-ups, we split into two groups to work on the two sets of lyrics that had been created the previous week. Hannah and I helped our group to turn the words into a song. We were delighted to see how much enthusiasm the kids had for the composing process, and how proud they were of the final product, which turned out as a calm and melancholy song about a hideous beast...

On je strašan jer ima oči kao vuk
He is scary because he has the eyes of a wolf

On je veliki jer ima glavu kao medo
He is big because he has the head of a bear
On je ružan jer ima zube kao krokodil
He is ugly because he has the teeth of a crocodile
Crno-bela zver, crno-bela zver
Black-white beast, black-white beast

Rather than writing a song, Sarah and Toni's group (which was generally a slightly older age-group) focussed on percussion - building up rhythms over which the lyrics were chanted. The workshop finished with each group performing their new piece to the other.

In preparation for our Thursday workshop in Skelani, I had transcribed our most successful improvisation from the conducting activity. We performed this "polished" version to the group, and they seemed to like it! We're planning to develop this piece further over the coming weeks, primarily by getting the group to write percussion parts for themselves to play. To this end, Toni gave an intensive introduction to his hand percussion - djembe, bongos, darbuka, sabar etc. - and then got the group playing simple patterns together to steady pulse. To finish we played a game with the percussion - splitting the group into pairs and asking each pair to come up with a rhythmic pattern based on a particular emotion (happy, sad, fear, love, anger etc.). Each pair played their little pattern to the group and then we asked the pairs to combine their patterns to find out what it sounds like to be happy and in love, or sad and fearful.

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Unfortunately we learned on Thursday that the theme of the Children's Music Theatre performance has been changed from "Beauty and the Beast" to a pirate story called "Captain John Peoplefox". This was rather frustrating, because all of our composition work so far with the various groups, as well as out plans for the coming weeks, was based around "Beauty and the Beast". It is possible that Beauty and the Beast may survive in some form, although we need some time to discuss whether this is feasible and reconsider our position. Hopefully we will have time to alter our plans, as the Christmas show would be the perfect opportunity to bring the various groups from the region together to share their songs etc.