21st Century Musician

In 2016 we were approached by Donegal Music Education Partnership to design a summer course for young musicians in Letterkenny. The brief was to give them relevant experience for the modern music industry. Sharing relevant skills in a practical way has always been a main driving force behind Wall2Wall Music, so this brief excited us a lot. We held a lot of discussions within our team and with a wider pool of musician friends and colleagues and asked them – what skills do you think are necessary for the 21st century musician?

On a creative level, improvising, composing and ensemble playing are essential skills regardless of genre, but these skills are often expected to be figured out on your own or with friends – in a bedroom or a garage. On a practical level, all the changes this second millenia has brought to the music industry means working as a musician requires skills far beyond just music making. As musicians we’ve learnt how to market ourselves, navigate studios, gigs and releases through years of working in music. Those skills are often overlooked, but we realised you are the most successful when you work these skills in tandem with your musicality. What amazing talent would crop up if we gave these young musicians access to all these skills, all at once? And what better way to do that than get them to write, release and promote their own songs and gigs?

It was these conversations that impacted how we designed Soundwaves – a three week course to build up skills for the 21st century musician.

Through a lot of thinking, we decided to start with the creative skills. On day one the young musicians would meet up, coming from many different genres and musical skill levels, and immediately start to improvise as a large, multi genre ensemble. We lead jam sessions, giving them tools for improvising as we went and made sure everyone had a chance to do a solo to break the ice. We took these improvisations and started to build a large ensemble piece which the entire group continued to expand upon during the course. By the end they had composed two incredibly complex pieces of music, but this was only the start. This space was to give them the tools to compose, the experience in playing and improvising together, and to push them out of their musical comfort zone. It was our central system where everything we asked them to do on their own they tried out in a big group first, guided by the facilitators.

On the second day, we then put them together into 5 bands  – eclectic bands with saxophones, cellos and uilleann pipes alongside guitars, drums and singers. Using the skills they had been working on in the large group they themselves wrote a song together that merged their respective genres.

On the third day, we began our self promotion and industry workshops. They all set up and ran social media pages for their newly formed bands. Once the songs were written,  we brought in producers with a rudimentary ‘home studio’ set up and the young musicians recorded their songs in empty classrooms with them, hands on learning how to do it as they went. Once the recording was finished, each band worked with a videographer to shoot and edit a music video themselves, some shot entirely on their smartphones. Another workshop on how to self release music saw the bands send their song and video to blogs, radio stations and reviewers. During release week we saw the youtube views on these music videos reaching 12,000  and they achieved some reviews from reputable Irish music journalists such as Nialler9.

The young musicians then put together an amazing live performance of all the music they created on the course – the band songs and the large ensemble pieces, even performing group improvisations live.

What these young musicians achieved when given the chance, the guidance and the knowledge was overwhelmingly impressive. I don’t think even we anticipated how much this course would affect the young participants. Seeing the confidence in their own skills and initiative grow was a privilege to be a part of and we’ve seen many of the Soundwaves graduates continue to write, release and gig their own music. We even saw Emer O’Tullahue, the keen songwriter from the original Soundwaves course perform her original song on Ellen!

Soundwaves was such a success it turned into a regularly occurring workshop series and this idea of having a project that focused on building skills for the 21st century musician caught on. We immediately got more requests to put together something similar for different communities of young musicians.

We put on similar projects across Ireland – Carlow Young Creatives and Opening Doors in Larne saw another incredible bunch of young musicians put their creativity into the world as they created new bands and cross genre compositions. Jam Bands Mayo saw us work with local music tutors in County Mayo to train them how to incorporate these 21st century skills in their music education – Jam Bands Mayo workshops continue to run on its own today. We’ve also worked with Music Generation to create an original composition with young ambassadors from across Ireland to showcase this kind of practical, relevant music education in the International Showcase of Music Education in Glasgow in 2016. (hyperlink to catalogue pages of these which showcase youtube video)

The best part of this kind of workshop is working with such talented young musicians and giving them the tools to thrive. Confidence, initiative and self-promotion are skills that are useful across so many sectors, but it has been particularly special to see some of these young attendees pursue music in some way. Attending their gigs or following their continued success online has been so rewarding, and we’re confident in another few years we’ll see graduates from all these courses crop up in our Spotify playlists, radio stations and iTunes charts!

We love working to this model, if you’re interested in bringing us on board to design a workshop for a community of musicians that focuses on skills for the 21st century musician email Sarah at sarah@wall2wallmusic.org to enquire