 |
| home > documents > The \'HOTBED Day\' at the National Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music, Plockton High School, 6 December 2003 |
|
CASE STUDY : THE ‘HOTBED DAY’ AT THE NATIONAL CENTRE OF
EXCELLENCE IN TRADITIONAL MUSIC, PLOCKTON HIGH SCHOOL, 6 DECEMBER
2003 Dr Karen Marshalsay AimsThe aim of the
day was to evaluate the use of the system with potential future RSAMD students,
to see how the school age pupils reacted to it, and to test if there was any
difference in reaction depending on whether the pupil was an instrumentalist or
vocalist. Background The National
Centre of Excellence in Traditional Music is located at Plockton High School in
the Skye and Lochalsh district of Highland Region. Pupils are selected by
audition and come from all over Scotland. They receive an additional 10 hours
of music to their standard school timetable, comprising two one hour one-to-one
lessons on first and second study, 4 hours of groupwork and 4 hours of
individual practice (one hour of each every night from Monday to Thursday).
Pupils live in the hostel and one weekend each month is a designated music
weekend with classes and activities on both Saturday and Sunday. It is the only
specialist music school which solely focuses on traditional Scottish music and
is funded by the Scottish Executive’s Excellence Fund. There are 22
pupils currently at the Centre who are all of a high standard both in terms of
ability and commitment. Indeed ex-pupils now make up a quarter of the
BA(Scottish Music) course’s current first year, and as the Centre is only in
its fourth year this is expected to increase. The Structure
of the Day About 12 of
the pupils were involved in rehearsals in Inverness on the HOTBED day. We split
the remaining ten students into two groups, a ‘tunes’ group and a ‘song’ group,
with the latter comprising both Gaelic and Scots singers. The first
session lasted an hour and had both groups coming together for an introduction
to the system. This was very similar to the kinds of demonstrations and
training sessions given both in the Academy and to various other conferences
and institutions. Various example items were played to give an indication of
the variety of material in the system. The second
session lasted for half an hour and each group was taken separately. The
purpose of this was to give the students hands on experience and to let them
choose material to work with in their last session of the day. There was some
initial reluctance to actually touch the computer but once someone had a go
they were all keen, and all had a generally high standard of computer literacy. The third
session for each group lasted for an hour and focussed on what they had chosen
in the previous session. The singers mainly looked for songs which they already
knew or for singers whose work they were aware of. There was initial surprise
when the song versions often turned out to be very different to the ones they
knew, which quickly turned to interest. The group decided to learn the version
of Andrew Lammie which was recorded by Sheila Stewart. The item was
played in its entirety several times, and then the words were taken down. To
begin with this was done using the index looping for each verse, however as
there are only 6 index markers on the system (and about 20 verses) this proved
rather unwieldy. A word document was opened and the words typed in as they were
sung, with various pauses as necessary. It took about 3 plays of the item to
get all the words transcribed. The students intitially began doing it
themselves, but as none of them could touchtype I eventually took over to speed
things up. We then sang the song along with the recording several times, and
the students were given a print out of the text. They were very happy with this
and plan to use it in their next singing lesson. The tune group
were less focussed. They were very interested in the video material of Ann
Heymann, who had visited the school the previous year and given masterclasses
there. They kept looking for tunes and composers from a more modern era than
the bulk of the material on the system. This is mainly due to a lack of
exposure to archive material or field recordings. I decided to focus on the James Scott Skinner items. I played
various recordings, looked at the biographical website by the North East
Folklore Archive which we link the Skinner items to, and then handed out copies of the music from Skinner’s own
publication The Scottish Violinist.
We listened to each tune while studying Skinner’s notation and then
discussed the differences from the way he played to the way they are written
down. We also discussed his style in general and compared it to modern versions
of the same tunes. The pupils found it hard to believe that they were actually
listening to material recorded by Skinner himself in 1910. CONCLUSIONS The pupils
were all very enthusiastic about the system and were surprisingly understanding
about the number of items which were listed but not available to hear. Because
this venue does not have a wideband network connection the clone of the system
(a copy of the HOTBED database on a laptop) was being used. This clone had not
been recently updated, which points to another administrative issue. If the
clone is to be successfully used in teaching situations without broadband
access, and this also applies to many teaching rooms within the RSAMD which do
not have any computer access, then regular updates of the clone will need to be
scheduled in. The main
benefit to the pupils as musicians was that it started to open doors to the
past and give them an idea of the wealth of material that survives in archival
field recordings. Up to this point the pupils, and this is also very true of
the Academy students in their first year especially, do not really know many
performers prior to the 1990s (ie in their own lifetimes), and consider bands
recording in the 70s and 80s such as Old Blind Dogs and Battlefield Band as
‘source’ material. This highlights the importance of a system such as HOTBED
which provides easy and instant access to older recordings. If there were a
linked terminal in their library the pupils would use it in the same way as
they go and listen to records and CDs for material. TECHNICAL
POINTS The laptop,
data projector and speakers were used. There were no problems with the set up
at all on the Saturday, although on the Sunday the laptop screen was unreadable
for some reason. The only difficulty was that so many items could not be played
due to the lack of proper updates to the laptop.
|
 |
||
 |
 |
|
| |
||
|
This page last modified: 18:03, Fri 25 Jan 80 This page published by HOTBED Project at RSAMD. |
||