Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival - radio programme transcripts (5)

Programme 5

(Juice)

We’re doing a mixture of concerts at a range of different community centres where we do have an audience and they’re expected to listen but they also get to join-in in lots of different ways. We’re also doing a workshop at Kirklees College with 10 adults with learning difficulties. We’re going to be doing singing and original composition with them using extended vocal techniques, culminating in a recording.

We get fantastic responses from the audience. In fact, we always have people coming up to hug us, shake our hands, kiss us, just say how much they enjoyed it. We get cheered and clapped very enthusiastically. It’s fantastic fun to put on the concerts.

In our music we try to overcome barriers of physical and learning disabilities by encouraging participants to join-in in any way we can - sing along with a simple tune or maybe just some clapping. We walk around and we sing quite closely to individuals so that they can hear one part maybe more than others - so it’s more like a personal performance.

Something else we’ve done to encourage audience participation is getting individuals to come up and conduct or direct us - showing us the speed that they want us to go at or sometimes dynamic, whether very loud or very soft. And we’ve had a couple of really excellent responses. They’ve come and used their hands in really beautiful expressive ways and really conducted us and really directed us and we’ve really responded to it.

We make a point of not just singing conventionally all the time, so we try and explore as much as possible all the different ways in which we can use our voice. We’ve demonstrated yodelling techniques in a German folk song and vocal percussion, ie making our voices sound a little bit like drum kit sounds, and something that we’ve got audiences to join in with is creating vocal sound effects - so what we’ve done is a rainstorm just using vocal sound effects. And it’s very short and simple but they mostly really enjoyed that and it’s a simple way of showing you can make sounds with your body and not just in the conventional way and it’s lots of fun.

(Participants)

The performance was absolutely spot-on. It was. It was absolutely spot-on.

It was very good. I liked the singing.

I remember the song was Amber Lou. I’m going to keep doing that all the way home tonight. (Is it a long way home?) No!...but I shall sing it anyway!

(Heidi Johnson)

Heidi Johnson, Festival Outreach.

For this project we’ve worked with Live Music Now to enable people in Kirklees, who wouldn’t normally have the opportunity, to experience and enjoy really high quality new music.

(Voice Over)

Contributors: Kerry Andrew, Anna Snow, Sarah Dacey – the Juice vocal trio; participants: Katie McVey, Dawn Leach. Music by the Juice vocal trio.

Festival Shorts are produced by Beaumont Street Studios.