1 results
two - Co-writing about co-producing musical heritage: what happens when musicians and academics work together?
- Edited by Helen Graham, University of Leeds, Jo Vergunst, University of Aberdeen
-
- Book:
- Heritage as Community Research
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 27 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 13 March 2019, pp 51-64
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
the yellow arch at Kriol Junction
dream place of lost dancehalls
cross-continental tracks meet and split
crackling algorhythms
storylines greet songlines
koranic cries pijin beats migrated babble
A diverse group, including musicians, musical educators, academics and artists, collaborated on a project exploring approaches and creative responses to processes in the transmission of musical heritage. To realise this chapter, some of us have come together to enact a process of co‑writing that forms a kind of negotiated dialogic and text-based equivalent to the co‑production experiences embedded in the original Transmitting Musical Heritage project. In this sense, this piece seeks to mirror and perform the process of our project. Through the form the chapter takes, we seek to engage you with the different ways of knowing our work (Vergunst and Graham, this volume), and to draw you into the rhythms, call and response, and improvisations of our collaboration. Our way of conceptualising this piece of co‑writing is strongly informed by the experiences that we have had as music-makers working primarily across oral traditions, accustomed to improvising, reacting and curating largely intangible moments.
The Transmitting Musical Heritage project involved a variety of activities and interventions, developing a range of partnerships. It continued long after the original project ended to work in schools and other contexts, and provides an enabling structure in which individuals and groups can work together on emergent projects. Three community groups (Arts on the Run, Babelsongs and Soundpost) worked in different ways to answer the question: what is transmitting musical heritage? In this chapter, we explore the process of researching how to transmit musical heritage through the process of co‑writing. How this might be done was not a given from the start and we begin by exploring the question of how we work together in the co‑writing process and allow for the improvisation of heritage as a form of ‘knowing’ and of ‘action’, to reference the two main themes of this edited collection. We then introduce key aspects of the projects, with a focus on the ‘Music co‑produced’ workshop. We draw the chapter to a close by reflecting on the necessary and ambivalent relationship set up with ‘the audience’ in any notion of ‘transmission’.