KATHERINE ZESERSON – DYCP application - practice examples
PUBLISHED POETRY:
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KEYNOTE ARTICLE FOR INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY MUSIC TO BE PUBLISHED MARCH 2021
The Magnificent Territory - pausing to reflect on a lifetime of working with people and music
Preamble
At the time of writing – August 2020 – I am 61 years and four months old. I can’t remember a time in my life before music. It has been a constant presence, a periodic challenge, a rich inspiration, a steady livelihood, a repository of memory, a mystery and a magnificent, infinitely unfolding territory of being. When I think about music throughout my life I have a 3D image in mind, like a hologram; a spinning, tessellating, Moebius strip of multiple geometric forms pulsing, fading, sharpening, coming close, receding, turning, twisting and surrounding me with the gentle buzz of an energy that leads just over that hill, just around that corner, just into the light that casts that shadow...
This is not an academic article, and I am not an academic, nor am I a researcher in the formal sense; but I am an investigator. I am driven by an intense curiosity, by trying to arrive at some sense of meaning in the world, by trying to understand myself, and by trying to figure out how we can best work together to make a kinder, fairer world. I’ve played and performed music since my childhood, and shared/taught it since I was in my late teens. I studied philosophy and psychology at university, because music seemed to me a limited field of study – I wanted to understand what it is to be human, how we feel and think and work, and how to create social justice through our humanity. And I felt sure that music had a role to play in support of that mission.
I stumbled into what became my professional life’s work when I was around 20 and have been trying to figure out how to do it the best I can ever since. The older I get, the more I know that I don’t know, and the more excellent books and research papers have been published in the fields of community music, music psychology, music and society, philosophy of music and music education that I haven’t yet read. I have a great respect for all of you that spend time and care on teasing out the rapidly evolving DNA of our trade/s, and shining light on our paradoxes, certainties and potentialities. Here I share with you some personal, work-in-progress musings on ‘community’ music in my own lifecourse, and some of what I have learned. The only evidence I have to offer in support of what I write about here is that of my own experience.
I have made my living in and around community music, performance, education, training and leadership for 40 years, have made the deepest professional and personal relationships and found the most profound joy in and through the practice of music-making.[1]
I see that music-making as a life-long practice has psycho-social value – engendering many different ways of being with people, and providing a territory in which we can investigate how we relate to others in real time. It has vocational value – affording a professional path. It has functional value – inviting us to develop knowledge of various kinds, and extending our technical, cognitive, expressive and soma-kinetic capacities. It has affective value – engendering strong emotions, and often feelings of happiness. For me, the most fundamental significance of music, however, lies in its existential value – how living in and through the metaphor of music offers us a continuous opportunity to investigate, create and rehearse a sense both of self and the absence of self; a sense of belonging; a sense of being-in-the-world. For some people music is experienced as an explicitly spiritual territory. This dynamic existential dance in music is available to all of us throughout the lifecourse, irrespective of age, skill, self-perception, context or any other extrinsic measure of our value. It available to us as listeners, players, performers, educators and all combinations.
It is this existential pull that has underpinned the impact of music on my lifecourse, and has driven my passion for ‘community music’ – for group music-making as a means of becoming ourselves with others. The experiences of self, and of self-and-others, that arise in music-making radiate and resonate far beyond the moment and yet are precisely located in the moment. There is simultaneously a sense of absolute self-presence, and a total absence of self-consciousness available that is creative and meditative, active and still, connected and private. It is as if we can get as close to ourselves as it is possible to be. When we find that space, it feels so good - and in sharing that impersonal intimacy with others, repeatedly, we may begin to see how we might bring that sense of self-in-balance to the wider world we live in.
We can experience music as nurture, as torture, as insight, as mystery, as sacred, as profane, as invitation, as rejection, as play, as learning, as relaxation, as labour, as memory, as prediction, as messy, as formal, as support, as challenge, as connection, as separation, as territory, as journey, as sound…and of course as silence. I carry no brief for any particular kind of music, or way of making music, or context for it, or any judgement about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ music; nor do I reify music. Like any form of human endeavour it can be used for ill as well as for good. I just know that if music kindles you, then the fire so lit can warm and guide you all your life, and provide a home base from which to travel, grow and explore multiple ways of being in the world. Music kindled me at an early age. I will share some snapshots of that fire-starting with you.
My apprenticeship
I spent the first eight years of my life in Hastings-on-Hudson (a suburb of New York City) and on East 52ndStreet in Manhattan. It was the early 1960s, and my parents were deeply involved in the women’s liberation movement, anti-poverty campaigning, civil rights and the protests against the war in Vietnam. Music, and in particular singing, frame and flavour all my earliest memories. My mother singing Peter, Paul and Mary songs or Irish ballads or blues songs to me in bed at night; the sounds of grown-ups raucously intoning Bob Dylan from the living room downstairs; Ella Fitzgerald’s silky Cole Porter; the sweet strength of Joan Baez; Harry Belafonte and his warm calypso; the vast scale of Mahalia Jackson’s velvet voice; the child-me sitting at the piano reading The People’s Songbook[i] picking out Woody Guthrie songs with one finger; my father’s Jewish Communist heritage and the 1940s protest ditties he would bellow with great enthusiasm and a glass of whiskey; my sax, guitar and piano playing older brothers and our easy vocal harmonies.
What did I learn about music in those early years? That it is the most joyful, moving, exciting and yet oddly restful way to be together, to share our feelings, share our experiences, share our views. It can build a sense of belonging. It is forgiving – you can’t break the music however you make it. And I learned that the making of music deeply transports me; that sense of sharing music whether in performance or creation or listenership - that being music is truly transformational. That in becoming music we somehow become ourselves.
When I was eight years old we moved to Ireland (where my great-grandparents came from), to a damp old house on a wild, windy, western clifftop. A strong contrast at so many levels, but here I experienced the taproot of that deep musical connectedness I had known from earliest childhood. One moment and one relationship stand out that set the course for my life in music, and from which I have drawn endless renewing insights as practitioner, performer, educator, manager, thinker and leader.
At the age of 9, I stand up beside my mother and father on the vinyl-covered benches that ring the back room of McLynn’s pub on Old Market Street in Sligo, in my best maroon dress with a mustard-coloured ribbon tied in my long plait, and I sing My Love Came to Dublin, unaccompanied, in and to the wide oval embrace of the session; the youngest singer but not the only child present. The same respect is accorded to me as to all those who contribute something; Donal the publican who runs the session with his limpid tenor voice and his Martin guitar, and the old man who always sings the very same mono-tonal song incomprehensibly, week in and week out, to the same affectionate shouts of ‘good man yourself’ and ‘rise it up there’. I’d been practising for weeks with my mother, and I was sick with fear for this first public performance. I’d been to the session before and I so admired the teenagers whose languid virtuosity on the tin whistle entirely belied their awkward body language, and I was determined to do it right. So I start to sing, a little quaveringly, and I can feel the loving attention of the 30 or so people in the room as if it is a cushion I am leaning on, a support that ensures I cannot fall – or fail – and I can feel my voice strengthen, and I can hear ‘good girl’ and ‘on you go, now’ as I sing, and something happens to my sense of presence so that I am both in and out of my body, both in the group and in myself. In that moment I am the song, and I am myself, and I am all of us.
All of my adult working life I have been motivated by the urge to create that same space for others, to open up that pathway of self-knowing and collective merging through music. This profound experience of music as social contribution and as force for both personal validation and community cohesion set the course for my professional practice. Thirty or more years later when framing the foundational plans for what became Sage Gateshead’s[2] Learning and Participation programme I wanted to ensure that we created that experience for everyone we connected with – that sense that in the music we are all always valid, and that we will always hold each other up, and that by sharing and making music together we strengthen ourselves and each other.
The childhood relationship that galvanised me was with Sister Marie Finan. She taught me piano, and she ran the choir at Ransboro Catholic Church, just a mile from where we then lived. We were not religious – in fact my parents were rather determinedly atheistic – but all social life revolved around the Church, and all my friends sang in the choir. So I did too, with rehearsals on Thursdays evenings and long, Latin services on Sunday mornings. Up in the choir loft Sister Marie secretly whispered – ‘ah sure we don’t need him down there (gesturing at the priest) for we’re talking to God directly up here’. She believed that to sing was to connect to the divine without mediation, in a sublimely collective and entirely personal communion, and to that end she brought together us motley girls and boys, women and men, farmers, homemakers, teachers, factory and shop workers in the most glorious harmony every week. Most of us didn’t read music much if at all, and I don’t remember her ever making any point of it, but we somehow learned to sing chorales, and fragments of Byrd and Tallis and I don’t know what all else, as well as the hymns in the book, and we sang them really well. It was like some glorious secret to be up there all smiling quietly at each other as we performed the mass in our own way… and then she would let me play ‘Bach’ on the organ at the end of mass as people left the church. That is to say, I would attempt to fumble through an easy Prelude or two and then would just improvise my way around the shapes as best as my fingers could manage and she would smile and nod her head, and occasionally add her own fingers to the keys for a little help. I terrified my parents one day by going home and announcing that I’d decided I wanted to have a job just like Sister Marie when I grew up…but they relaxed when they realised that I didn’t want the nun part, just the helping everyone to sing together so joyfully and gorgeously part…
I learned something utterly profound about ‘quality’ in music through singing in her choir. She saw it as her mission to enable us to fully be ourselves in song, to touch our deepest, most authentic feelings in and through the music, and she regarded practice – including vocal exercises, breathing techniques etc. as well as rigorous note-bashing – simply as the invaluable tool that helped us achieve that highest expression of self-and-others. So there were never mistakes made in her world, just improvements to find; there was never boring repetition for us, but rather deeper musical possibilities to mine. Her greatest delight was to hear us sing our best, and our greatest motivation was her faith in us. She coaxed us beyond what we believed ourselves to be capable of through the application of love, determination, humour and a kind of wicked joie de vivre – and as I realised years later - highly attuned musical knowledge and skills. Furthermore, I learned that to ‘sing our best’ wasn’t just about how fine our collective intonation was, or how smooth our collective phrasing, but about how our choices in relation to intonation and phrasing and all of the intentional scaffolding of song released meaning, beauty and heartfulness into the air for all to feel. Serving our deepest communicative purpose.
Many years later when teaching voice to undergraduate music theatre students I would play them a series of recordings: including Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald, Rustavi Choir from Georgia, Leadbelly, Joan Sutherland, Peter Pears, Joe Cocker, Mongolian throat singers, Sweet Honey in the Rock, the Tallis Scholars, field recordings of London children from the 1930s, Laura Nyro, Zap Mama, Tom Jones, Mahalia Jackson etc. …you get the picture. I would ask them to decide whether / which of the singing was ‘good’ and why. I was directly channelling Sister Marie. In my current role as Quality Advisor to Music Generation (Ireland’s national performance music education programme)[3] I have thought of her again and again as we’ve worked our way through designing a deeply reflective, context-responsive and person-centred Quality Framework. For me, community music across the lifecourse always means something about quality – quality generated from the choices made by facilitator/musicians and participant/s that enable everyone to find that sweet spot of self-in-balance, fully realising authentic musical and personal potential in each moment. And fulfilling the collective purpose. If it is to play the score as written, then doing whatever we need to do in order to play the score as written. If it is to compose a song together, then doing what we need to do to ensure everyone is able to contribute. If it is sing the child to sleep, then singing the child to sleep. Do we know what our musical, social, political or other purpose is in this music-making? What do we know about the circumstances and conditions that will best serve it? What might we wish to do about that? And so on.
But I run ahead of myself. Adolescence arrived inevitably and was painful, and music was both a refuge and a site of protest. We were living in Devon then, and I fell in with some wild-eyed free jazzers and declared the death of the score. I played and sang improvised music with much older musicians, performing in venues to people sitting at little smoky tables as well in auditoria where I couldn’t see their faces. The adrenaline caught me – and the alcohol, and the sense of transgression – but what I liked best was the rehearsal room and the messing about with music; that feeling of groping in the dark together to find something hidden in the music and then unearthing it…I soon moved pretty much off the piano to focus on voice. I’d never been a very assiduous pianist – I only really wanted to play Bach or Bartok - and I passed my Grade 8 sight-reading test by improvising based on a quick scan of the first four bars. Improvising has always been a place of safety for me - in life as in music - since those troubled years.
Meanwhile, I was barely set to scrape a pass at Music O level, because it seemed to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with music as I knew it. It is now pretty well understood within music education that making music is the best route to learning music – at least so I hope and believe – and in the UK the community music movement has played a significant leadership role in illustrating and anchoring that insight. Learner as player as listener; listener as player as learner - that was my transformational experience in music. Making music with others lit me up. Improvising or co-creating or faithfully realising someone else’s composition, singing in joyful companionship, laying down deep patterns of being that I still live from.
In January 1979, in my final year at university, I had lunch with my older brother Alan. He said: ‘So what are you going to do when you graduate? What do people do with a degree in philosophy and psychology?’ and I said ‘I really don’t know. I just know that I want to do something with people and music.’ And he said ‘you mean like a music teacher? Or kind of musical social worker?’ and I said ‘I don’t think it’s quite either of those but I don’t really know what it is. I’m not sure how or where or what it could be.’ And he said ‘well if that’s what you want to do, than you must just do it – whatever that takes. Just make it real.’ And the waiter brought my pudding, and I felt a flush of excitement and a sense that maybe I really … would do that.
A year later I answered an ad in the London Evening Standard for a part-time ‘art-room worker’ to join the team at the White Lion St. Free School[4] in North London. I applied proposing to set up a music room instead, and got the job. I have been travelling my imagined path and making it real ever since.
Becoming a community musician
Commitment to equity of contribution is core to creating conditions in which everyone can flourish. Whether viewed through the prism of that childhood Irish session, or my later immersion in the radical insights of Dorothy Heathcote[5] and her pioneering drama in education work, I have seen time and again whatever point we are at in our life journey – from infancy to elderhood – that we are valued as we are is utterly vital to building our capacity to grow, change and realise our potential. We cannot be generous if we do not believe that what we have to offer is worth something, and if we cannot be generous we cannot collaborate. If we cannot collaborate we cannot participate fully in community life, and have agency in the dynamic social balancing act required to ensure justice and fairness.
Of course music isn’t the only effective path to vibrant community development, nor is music the only social practice that enables the deep knowing and growing of self and community that I am advocating for here. I have extended family members who really don’t like to sing – who’d rather do ALL of the Christmas washing-up than join in with post-dinner carols – and that used to disturb me; indeed I used to read it as a person/professional failure that I had nephews and nieces who didn’t want to sing with me…but then I remembered that signally important truth, which is that we all need to be able to choose. And I re-affirm the holistic model – with listening, playing and performing as of equal potential potency. My experience of music across the lifecourse has been that for many of us it has a complex, enveloping and endlessly renewing power to help us learn, grow and experience deep joy and revelation. Because that might be true for any of us then it must be available to all of us from the earliest years – so we can choose, and keep choosing.
Social justice arises out of a fully equitable balance between self and others. Music offers us the richest of metaphors, a place to play with that balance, to weave in and out of different positions; exploring our freedom/sovereignty within the collective. But not all music making is like that, I hear you cry – what about the experience of confinement and constraint and negative judgement that many professional musicians have lived with all their working lives? What about the discrimination, exploitation and disappointments of the music industry? What about, for example, the negative self-image so many people carry about their voices, and the persistence of the ‘I can’t sing’ feeling? Yes, those experiences are real and true. And I would argue that it isn’t music that engenders those negative impacts, but rather the social and political construction of music as an institution, of our education system, our hierarchy of values and the power dynamics surrounding particular kinds of music performance and learning - these inequities and abuses are systemic and entrenched in our dominant culture. Music itself is innocent, and carries infinite potential for freedom, beauty and grace. Music can be a tremendous force for, of and within personal, social and political emancipation.
1980 to 2000 passed for me in a wild whirlwind of discovery and growth. My personal life took me to the Northeast of England in 1984, and I became a mother in 1985. Meanwhile, I worked intensively in the newly emerging field of community music; working with mental health service users, young people, women’s groups, people with learning difficulties, children, elders, artists; as well as singing and playing in bands. It was a time characterised by revelation and synthesis: absorbing insights from West African musicians I had the honour to study with in London and Senegal; discovering Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of Hope[ii] and associated works[iii] and feeling like I’d met an old friend; establishing a lifelong bond with drama worker Geraldine Ling[6]and discovering the work of Augusto Boal[iv] and Dorothy Heathcote[v]; similarly meeting Pete Moser[7] and knowing I wasn’t alone; joyfully working my way through John Stevens’ Search and Reflect[vi] and Kristin Linklater’s Freeing the Natural Voice[vii] ; attending Giving Voice events at CPR[8] in Wales and meeting my singing soulmate Helen Chadwick[9] ; reading John Chernoff[viii] and realising that my experiences as a child in Ireland had their counterparts all over the world….I could write pages and pages about the critical and creative encounters I am so grateful to have had with visionary musicians, community artists, social activists, educators, researchers and writers that opened my eyes and ears and continue to influence and encourage me.
A broader canvas
By the late 1990s, my professional practice was firmly grounded in an explicitly feminist, left-wing political context. I’d spent four years at White Lion Street Free School working with young people, most of them living in severely challenging circumstances. I then spent an intense, inspiring, head-spinning decade as a member of Them Wifies, a women’s community arts collective based on Tyneside, working alongside Geraldine Ling and using music as a force for social change and empowerment, mostly with working-class women and girl’s groups, and with people with learning difficulties. I then returned to the free-lance life, leading community choirs, running community radio broadcast projects, teaching at college and university level, performing in bands and musical directing. I had a deep distrust of the mainstream arts and cultural sector, and whilst I’d spent time as a musician-in-residence in various schools, I had no interest in working within the formal education system.
In 1998 I found myself contracted simultaneously by two very different music organisations – Folkworks, the Northeast’s folk development agency, and Northern Sinfonia, the Northeast’s chamber orchestra. In both cases I was working with musicians to develop community and education skills (as we called them then). With Folkworks it involved training for free-lancers, and with the orchestra I was working to plan and deliver a new community and education programme. I’d never encountered the professional culture of classical music before, having always played in vernacular, jazz and popular contexts. It was a shock to meet musicians whose professional lives were in some cases so constrained and unhappy, and to see first-hand how the hierarchical model of music-making could have the effect of separating people rather than connecting them - apparently through its focus on what I perceived as a rigid musicological framework and formal protocols of performance. This was in stark contrast to the informal connectedness espoused by the folk musicians I was working with. However, it swiftly became clear to me that my knee-jerk assumption that one approach was ‘better’ than other in terms of community and education work was entirely facile, and that buried inside what appeared to be the rigidity of the classical model was a fiery passion for just as beautiful and meaningful a music, which when gently encouraged into a respectful social discourse could engender as transformational an experience for participants, listeners and players as any jazz, folk or popular music practice.
This was a pivotal insight for me in terms of my understanding of how music might truly include any and all who choose it - it pushed me beyond my simplistic socio-political assumptions about the content of community music and towards an ever deeper reflection on purpose, process and practice. The external driver and context for this thinking was my involvement in the emergence of what became Sage Gateshead – described in our 2004 vision statement as: “an international home for music and musical discovery with local roots, a world-wide reputation, a global programme and a fully inclusive welcome to all its users and to all musical styles and languages.” The idea of the organisation was seeded through an enlightened process of cross-boundary partnership thinking in the second half of the 1990s, and made real through significant investment from the National Lottery, from Arts Council England, from the European Union and from Gateshead Council. Ground was broken for the innovative Norman Foster building in 2000, and we opened in December 2004.
From 2001 – 2015 I immersed myself in working with an extraordinary team of colleagues in inventing, testing, refining, and realising at scale what we came to call Sage Gateshead’s Learning and Participation programme. My initial involvement was as a free-lance consultant, then as full-time Head of Community Music, then Co-Director of Learning and Participation and from 2006 the sole Director of Learning and Participation.
I refused the full-time job when it was first offered to me, because my self-image didn’t include the idea of joining the mainstream, and Sage Gateshead was everything I thought mainstream was – a building, an orchestra, government and philanthropic stakeholders – and I explained to the remarkable Anthony Sargent, founding General Director, that I thought I would be of greater value observing from outside the organisation and acting as a critical friend/gadfly. He listened, and then said he was a little surprised by that response, as he had thought I would be the kind of person who would be interested to find out whether my theories would work in practice, and at scale…well that did it. I accepted.
The questions that drove me were these – is it possible to create a large-scale, mainstream, building-based cultural institution that lives via the inclusive, equitable and service-driven values of a small-scale, grassroots creative organisation? And could we create sustainable participatory opportunities of quality in music-making for people of all ages, appetites and situations, underpinned by Freireian principles of inclusion, democracy and equity, across the whole of the Northeast of England?
When I left in 2015, my curiousity was satisfied. To the second question, I think we can say, on balance, yes. The innovative, dedicated team created a vanguard community music training / apprenticeship programme of real depth; established consistent, high-quality opportunities for literally hundreds of thousands of people to engage in sustained music-making and learning in their own communities or in our building, across most genres of music, at all levels of challenge; collaborated deeply with more than half of the schools in the region over the long-term; worked forensically to seek out and serve people with specific, often hidden, needs; and to serve communities struggling with horrible disadvantages. We were one of four proud founding partners in Sing Up[10], established the UK’s first BA in Community Music with Sunderland University; were funded by the Department for Education Skills as a Music Manifesto Pathfinder project; and built significant national and international partnerships for music learning, and for our own development and critical challenge. Within the Learning and Participation department, we generated millions of pounds of investment to ensure most of our programmes were were highly subsidised or free. We created an employment framework for over 100 community musicians, with permanent part-time contracts, employee benefits, paid-for CPD and training and a high level of control and influence over their own working situations. Of course there were challenges within the model, and there are decisions I would now make differently; both with the clarity of hindsight and just because I am humbler, wiser and more experienced; but in the main the model was sound. We created a vibrant, extensive, inclusive community of practice and sustained it for well over a decade
As to the first question, the answer is more complex. I can say for a while it worked, in part; and then over time it seems there is an internal bias in the engine of a large institution that despite all best intentions begins to take over, and imperceptibly the purpose of the institution becomes weighted more towards its own narrowly defined survival than towards the service of its communities. Sage Gateshead was born in the idealistic and financially free-flowing landscape of the early years of the Tony Blair Labour government, and was gradually bruised and battered by the emergent neo-liberalism of the era that followed. I am not going to tell the story of Sage Gateshead here, and of course it is still unfolding. But by the spring of 2014 I realised that I had become an administrator, spending most of my 60-70 hour working week managing money, people and political processes both internal and external; so I gave a year’s notice and left in April 2015. I had no plan whatsoever, and like a homing pigeon I went back to source. The day after I deleted my Sage Gateshead email account I travelled to Ireland by a stormy ferry crossing, and hibernated for a month.
And so …
Over the last forty years I have developed a more complex, nuanced understanding of how we learn and grow and live together, and how music can weave in and around us. I have spiralled back towards my beginnings in some ways, working on reflection, self-development, practice and vision with musicians involved in community / health / learning; singing, creating and co-leading community projects with my beloved colleagues in vocal quartet Mouthful[11]; collaborating with Professor Graham Welch and a team of innovative music learning leaders to build a free online resource for schools[12]; creating leadership training for teachers committed to cultural learning, and so on. I have spent several intense and deeply transformational periods living in Sao Paulo, Brazil working on leadership, music and social pedagogy with Santa Marcelina Cultura[13]; always returning from those trips more challenged, inspired and determined to keep on keeping on than ever.
I have trained as a coach and now work one to one with people, as well as facilitating collective thinking and change in music/cultural organisations. I have a long-term commitment to strategic advisory work with Music Generation, focusing on quality and on professional learning throughout the national network; and with Phillipa Reive and her visionary colleagues at Britten Pears Arts[14] I am co-creating a 10-year discourse - Shared Thinking - about music in the world and how it can best serve society, bringing together colleagues from science, health, education, public service and the wider arts community alongside musicians to challenge, collaborate and innovate with and within music.
I continue to walk a fine line between knowing what I’m doing and not knowing what I’m doing, imagining and inventing, seeking new perspectives and being curious. There is more space now in my work and my world view for silence, for other-than-musical processes of transformation and growth, for greater acceptance of the imperfections of all endeavour. I have come to find that ‘it’s a little more complicated than that’[15], always; that we have to keep pulling the camera back to see the widest shot we can; that it is good to sit easily with paradox; that it pays to listen more; that we must always, always, always keep faith that we humans are made to collaborate, and remember that an injury to one is an injury to all. I guess my work now is a little more about the people than the music, whereas perhaps in the earlier years the balance might have sometimes tipped the other way; but it is all one.
Music affords me an ever-changing metaphor in which to hold myself gently, music as ‘the most perceptible and the least material thing[16]’. I am so grateful for a life lived in this magnificent territory.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] See www.zeserson.com
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29518319
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/17/dorothy-heathcote
[6] Founding Artistic Director of Lawnmowers Independent Theatre Company http://lawnmowerstheatre.com/, social justice campaigner
[7] Founding Artistic Director of More Music in Morecambe https://moremusic.org.uk/ composer, improviser
[8] https://thecpr.org.uk/archived-projects/
[9] https://helenchadwick.com/
[13] https://gurisantamarcelina.org.br/en/
[14] https://brittenpearsarts.org/
[15] Dr. Dave Camlin, in conversation, often….
[16] Chernoff, p.23
[i] Eds. Hille, W. and Lomax, A., The People’s Songbook, Boni &Gaer 1947
[ii] Freire, P., Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Herder and Herder, 1970
[iii] Hope, A. and Timmel, S., Training for Transformation - A Handbook for Community Workers, ITDG Publishing, 1984
[iv] Boal, A., Games for Actors and Non-Actors, Routledge, 2002
[v] Heathcote, D; Collected Writings on Education and Drama, Northwestern University, 1991
[vi] Stevens, J,. Search and Reflect, Community Music, 1985
[vii] Linklater, K., Freeing the Natural Voice, Drama Publishers, 1976
[viii] Chernoff, J., African Rhythm and African Sensibility, Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms, Chicago University Press 1983