The Festival

Programme Outline

The programme begins with the presenter setting out the requirements of the task for the students of Elizabeth Garret Anderson School:

• Learn an African song (by ear).
• Arrange the music for school instruments.
• Produce it for and perform it at a local festival.

He then raises a fundamental question: whether you can successfully take a piece of music from one tradition and translate it into another.

The students decide that they first of all need to learn an African song, so they go 'hot foot' to Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Bristol. Here they meet a professional group playing traditional African instruments. The group introduce themselves and their instruments, and in doing so also give us an insight into aspects of African culture.

The instruments they play are: the cabassa, the talking drum, the djembe, and the corra.

The students then ask the group to help them with their task. They begin by listening to the group performing a traditional song.

The task of arranging begins with the students being taught, by ear, the various parts for their instruments (steel pans) which go to make up the arrangement: vocal part, bass, tenor, and 'double guitar' pans.

Back at school, the students begin the task of structuring their piece. They discuss:

• The role of various instruments within the ensemble (for example, drum kit to keep a steady pulse).
• The difficulties of playing complex rhythmic patterns against one another.

We then go through, with the students, the teaching of parts to additional instrumentalists. They decide to use a trombone and a trumpet, which follow the lines for the steel pans, and a piano playing chords of C minor and F minor throughout. As the violinist is absent, they use two keyboards to create a new effect: sustained chords on one and pizzicato chords on the other. The following issues are addressed:

• transposing instruments
• developing a part to suit the style of a piece
• creating variety within the arrangement

The 'putting it together' part of the rehearsal process is left largely to the students' imagination. We then cut to some footage in which the context of the performance is set before the final result is heard.