Spotlight – An orchestra in a village

Gillian Perkins reflects on how one village project managed to introduce music to the whole community.
Last November, as part of the Cambridge Music Festival, the London Mozart Players (LMP) moved into the village of Swavesey. Orchestra in a Village took two years of my life to plan and fund, and, as far as I know, was almost unique.

The result was a week where fantastic music-making took over a village, receiving an unheralded response. Like most arts managers, I juggle with the quality versus quantity equation all the time. How to make our limited resources go further and deeper is something I battle with every day. Nothing unique there  we all do it. The festival I run only happens once every three years, and our organisation is tiny.

Since we were hardly going to change the world, just for once in my career I wanted to make music the talking point in the shops, on the street corner, in peoples everyday lives, regardless of whether they had been involved before or not. So, I set about spreading the jam much thicker on a much smaller piece of bread. What would happen if we concentrated some real musical resource on a village? Thus it was that Swavesey, a village with 2,500 residents, became home to the LMP for a week.

Music for all

My friends in Swavesey would not like me to say it, but this was a kind of social engineering: what would happen if we pulled up the drawbridge and left the musicians and villagers to work together? During the week the LMP were joined by composer Fraser Trainer who worked extensively in Swavesey Village College. The players worked alongside him, as well as visiting all eight of the College’s feeder primary schools. They played for the housebound, in the local sheltered-housing complex, at a day centre for the elderly, at clubs for those with special needs, the WI, mothers and toddlers sessions, after-school groups for instrumentalists, and with musicians of all abilities.

We set up a community choir to sing at the final concert in the parish church, we made music for business leaders and funders, music at a small industrial site and a wonderful riotous concert for families. All round the village people were scurrying to and fro clutching instruments, hotly pursued by the local camera club, not to mention the local press, television and radio.

Now, some four months on, I find time to reflect. I am sure many people reading this will, like me, have set off with high ambitions to take a project out to a new community, only to find that the ends somehow have lost their flavour by the time we get to them. The relationships have gone sour or perhaps the realities have not lived up to the vision. Not so this time: my dreams for Orchestra in a Village came true.

Even those close to a cultural centre like Cambridge are quite self-reliant on the entertainment front. Music, drama, sculpture, poetry readings are frequently built on a local society, a single local artist or teacher. Outside intrusions can be a threat to this rather cosy middle-class club. The other side of the coin to recognising that a new event is something special, worthy of greater attention, is admitting home-grown productions are not up to snuff.

Planning

How should you get over the accusation of being patronising and get everyone on the same side? The superficial answer is to involve local people at every stage. But how do you do that without upsetting what is already there? The main reason for our success was the relationships we established over two years of planning.

Swavesey had two people working there  Audrey Caldwell, a music teacher at the village college, and the villages new Arts Development Manager – who just happened to be passionate about music. Both of them had the support of the college head and of the Council’s arts development team. I learnt, the hard way, that trying to make contact with Swavesey independently of them was a waste of time. The village trusted Audrey, a long-standing head of music, implicity. Any outsider was not given the same attention. If participation was king, the local head of music was queen. We established an adult choir which was joined by pupils from the college itself. At the performance the choir was a real unit, adults and younger singers, singing, working, discussing music together. The village was small enough for the intergenerational links to be very real.

Choir apart, the residency overall was managed by a steering group, with the college head, music staff, South Cambridgeshire team, the LMP, me and the festivals project manager. We all met once a term. I was keen to divide up all the modules in the residency between us, to share the load. We allocated two people to each event  one for musical content, one for making it happen. Such a horizontal team took control of their piece of the action. The Swavesey team had lots of personal contacts, which they were happy to exploit because it was their residency. So we were involved with all the schools, with meals on wheels, parents and toddlers groups, the camera club, owners of big houses who could host a concert or two, people who could provide beds for musicians, church-wardens and people to move chairs.

Systems matter

The downside was the risk that busy people would occasionally lack the space for complete communication, but shared owenership was valuable. When things started to unravel we had built up such a good team, with real personal relations between musicians and local organisers, that we were able to put things right easily. If our project manager was the engine’s hub, the relationships were its oil. A more vertical management would have taken control of the residency, had a project manager at its top rather than its heart, and asked the village to participate. It might have looked good on paper, but would we have got so many people involved, would we have known what to do when things got complicated? More crucially would we have the left the village asking for more, and hoping that we can go back and work there again? Would the village be demanding that our ideals of legacy actually see the light of day?

As it is, everyone is saying ‘Can we have more?’ If only we had more jam…

Gillian Perkins is Director of the Cambridge Music Festival.
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