uncharted territory
In this guest blog, Tolbooth Music Development Officer Kenny Bates reflects on his experience of lockdown:
My job during lockdown has been a mix of complex work-arounds, uncharted territory and creative collaboration. With our usual Tolbooth workshop and event plans being off the table for the foreseeable future, we’ve been busy behind the scenes collaborating with our super-skilled and hilarious crew of freelance music tutors. We’ve been working hard to find meaningful ways to connect with both our current and new groups of young people through music.
It has been great! Together we’ve created upwards of 60 unique music-learning and music-experience activities, comprised of over 70 video resources, 34 audio tracks and a pile of worksheets and documents. There’s hopefully something for every age, level or interest - so dive in and see what catches your eye and feel free to share with your friends: Creative Learning resources.
Group video-conferencing workshops have also been a fantastic way of keeping engagement going with our young people. Maintaining social interaction within groups that have otherwise been unable to connect has been great to see. Attendees have talked about the virtual meet-ups giving their week structure and how little they’ve been able to interact with their usual peers. Gaming and social media seem to have helped maintain connections, but face-to-face real-time interaction has largely been lost for some of them, even as restrictions have loosened.
As a musician and songwriter, lockdown has been a sort of shuffled deck of pros and cons. Time, social connection, access to music equipment and home recording time, routine, weighting of the work/life balance, access to art/performance - everything suddenly flipped and at once you were handed precisely what you thought you were looking for and lost what you didn’t realise you’d been using.
All the most exciting bursts of inspiration for me have always come in that 5 minutes noodling on a guitar before I have to head out the door. Not in the afternoon off or the evening I have the flat to myself, oh no. I’ve spoken to so many creative friends who (I mean despite the horrors and the huge uncertainties over income and job security, plus everything else that has come with COVID-19) have in some ways been granted all they’ve ever wanted - infinite time, space, quiet - and yet they’ve struggled to make it count creatively.
A few months on, I guess it feels now like learning an obvious lesson, the need for varied experiences of people, of life, the stimuli of outside influence, factors outwith your control, in order to make good art. Those things that art seeks to explain and connect people over, maybe why it exists in the first place.
I tried in desperation even writing a song about that at one point. It was rotten, but aye ok, nice try!
Inspiration and creativity are arguably so thrilling to experience because of how unstructured, free and unpredictable the journey is when they hit. You just have to deal with the unpredictability of their whereabouts sometimes, and it seems no different during any experience like lockdown! It’s the price you sometimes have to pay, kicking about for ages waiting for it all to turn up. But it always does eventually.
Kenny Bates, Music Development Officer at the Tolbooth.