When I was encouraged to do research for this master's degree, I wanted to come up with a project that touched on the themes of institutionalisation, music and society, but I also wanted the research to contribute to my personal development as a musician, as well as being a potential workplace in the future. That's why I decided to work with children for this research. And then expecially children with no musical education.
There are many reasons for this. Firstly, I'm working in a genre of music that already has a very small audience. This means that, as a performer, I have to actively work to make this genre of music more accessible. Secondly, children are not born with prejudices, this is something we learn as we get older. This makes children much more open to alternative things than us adults. In a world that is becoming increasingly polarised, isn't the curiosity to learn and understand something unknown one of the most important qualities we humans can have? This is where I think the characteristics of children and art and music come into play. Since music and art are emotions, expression and communication, art and music can be a way of being curious, exploring and expressing ourselves beyond words. Exposure to different forms of expression, being curious and trying to understand even if you don't, is something art and music teach us. It teaches us not to categorise things, to just let them be what they are, and perhaps most importantly, it challenges us.
Exploring this characteristic of children as open-minded people leads me to my third point, which is that I think we have a lot to learn from them. The older I get, the more I realise that we adults lose many childlike qualities, and it's no wonder. Through the education system and growing up, we start to lose our curiosity because we're told to fit into certain boxes. We're taught to be a person who functions in society, but at the same time I feel we lose the ability to play and explore somewhere along the way.
With all this in mind, I felt that I needed to create a space where children could get out of the mould of teaching and instead work on expressing themselves through impulses and emotions. I am first and foremost a performer, not a pedagogue, and therfor it was natural for me to approach this research from the performer's perspective. Given the changes taking place in the field of art and music for children, I wanted to immerse myself in a project that creates art on children's terms. This has led to my research question becoming:
Through this research, I will through exploration create a workshop concept. The process starts with mine and my fellow musicians' motivation for the project. It takes us through a year-long process of exploring how the workshop develops, how the children participate, how we react to the children and how this process affects my artistic practice.