Archive for the ‘Residency’ Category

Fitzroy Crossing Residency 2/2018 Week 1

Tuesday, September 25th, 2018

This blog post of week 1 is written by Gillian Howell – Tura’s current Musician in Residence in Fitzroy Crossing, Kimberley, WA. This is part of a three year program supported by Healthway, promoting the Act-Belong-Commit message, and The Ian Potter Foundation.


Week 1: On moustaches and magic

With the Marulu class at Fitzroy Valley District School, where kids with particular learning and developmental needs work together, creativity is pretty unfettered. I only needed to suggest we might write a song together and the boys had begun to suggest lines (they are all boys in this class at the moment). ‘Magic Man made a moustache’ is the first one. It’s quite a catchy opener (not something you might immediately expect from the word ‘moustache’). In our first two sessions we had two songs written, in the third, we added a second verse to the first one, and set up some fine accompanying percussion grooves that the boys were performing very solidly.

In Week 3, we taught the song to the whole of the primary school. The boys were excited to share it – lots of cheeky, conspiratorial, and delighted grins between them. Their teacher later told me that they were a little critical of their peers’ efforts to sing their song in one short, five-minute session: “They didn’t sing all the words!”

Marulu class also wrote a second song in Week 1, about stars. They experimented with sounds on a range of metal instruments and with making bird calls with their voices, and then recorded a soundscape to go with their Stars song.

Week 1: Raising the voices of Fitzroy Valley kids

Throughout this second 2018 residency I’ve been exploring ideas around ‘voice’: raising voices, claiming space for new or quieter voices, helping individuals to find their voice, and developing individual voices’ creative expression.

One of the strategies has been to help encourage some whole-school singing to happen on a regular basis. The primary school children have a 20-minute morning routine each day from 8am that includes physical activity (usually a chasing game, lots of laughter and unpredictability) and a short sequence of breath-based activities designed to clear air passages and reduce incidence of ear infections that can arise from build-up of mucous in the passageways between the nose and the ears (known as Breathe-Blow-Cough, or BBC, and used in schools throughout the Kimberley). During my residency we’ve added a daily song to this routine. Each day I’ve taught a short song to the group, encouraging them to breathe deeply and exercise their voices, but also to have the experience of social connection, cooperation, and togetherness that singing together can bring.

Learning a new song each day is no small task. I included songs in a range of languages (from South Africa, Cameroon, Ghana, Israel as well as the USA, Torres Strait Islands, and Australia). One of the songs had been written by the Marulu group the previous week, and it was so catchy and appealing we knew we wanted to give every primary school child the chance to learn it. The singing took place in a large undercover area, and I encouraged the children to tilt their heads slightly towards the metal roof, in order to experience their voices within its amplifying effects.

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Blog 3: The Wild Violins at Warmun’s Ngalangangpum School

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2018

Hollis Taylor with Jon Rose are Tura’s Musicians in Residence at Warmun, East Kimberley as part of Tura’s ongoing Regional and Remote residency Program. Hollis Taylor writes of their third week there.

Strange as this may sound, The Wild Violins of Warmun is actually a product of the rise of China. Jon has been to the factory on the outskirts of Beijing where these instruments are mass-produced. It used to be that cheap Chinese violins from the time of Mao were a bit of a joke, but these days they are quite playable. So, by way of total contradiction, this project is actually only possible now, because for $40 you can get a violin, a bow, a case, spare strings, rosin—including postage from China, when typically, you could not buy any one of those (except rosin) for $40 in the West. This has allowed Tura, through its funders and donors, to bring 22 violins to a remote Aboriginal town for an investment of less than $1,000.

Our focus in Week 3 was two performances we took part in. The first was an all-school event in the Music/Drama Room. The youngest in the audience sat on carpets in the front, while family and community members as well as older students were seated in the back. It was a full house. Eight students from years 1 – 6 joined five high school students to make a full resonant sound that demanded to be heard—and the audience agreed that these students had really made remarkable progress in such a short time.

Ngalangangpum class photo | Image by Mark Jones

The following day, Tura’s 2018 Narli Tour, performed in the outdoor amphitheatre. Guitarist, singer/songwriter, and didgeridoo legend Mark Atkins was joined by cellist Judith Hamann, percussionist Joe Talia, and flautist Tos Mahoney in a school concert. A number of students joined the percussion section of the band. The band’s musical celebration continued at the Warmun Arts Centre that night. It began indoors, featuring The Wild Violins of Warmun joined by Mark and Judith (as well as Jon Rose, Jean-Michel Maujean, and me on violins). We concluded by winding our way through the gallery in a long line. Students from the school who had only participated in the first two workshops joined us for this final number. It seems playing violin is contagious!

Tura’s 2018 Narli Tour | Image by Mark Jones

The celebration at Warmun Arts Centre was concluded with a Wanga by the Gija Dancers, an uplifting and fitting end to our Residency at Warmun.


The 2018 Regional Residency Program is supported by Healthway promoting the Act-Belong-Commit message, The Ian Potter Foundation and the Rowley Foundation.

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The Wild Violins at Warmun’s Ngalangangpum School

Thursday, June 21st, 2018

Hollis Taylor with Jon Rose are Tura’s Musicians in Residence at Warmun, East Kimberley as part of Tura’s ongoing Regional and Remote residency Program. Hollis Taylor writes of their second week there.

Jean-Michel Maujean, a PhD candidate at Edith Cowan University in Perth, joined us for our second week here. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and DJ who builds his own instruments, including 3D printed flutes, a 16-tone piano, and his self-titled Hydrowoofer. Never having played the violin is not holding him back—he’s racing along and a welcome addition to the team. He’s also arrived with projects of his own: a laser-cut book of local songbirds, 360° astrophotography, and video editing training.

This week with the violin students, I’ve continued to emphasise the rhythms, melodies, and timbres of Australian birds, insects, and frogs. The bow is the secret to much of what happens on the violin: the whisper of bird wings (lateral bowing), the trilling of frogs (a quick tremolo at the tip of the bow), col legno (stick rhythms on the string), bouncing bows, etc. Other violin colours they have learned include slap sounds and strumming pizzicato sounds. At all ages, the students are skilled at clapping and then playing a wide variety of rhythmic patterns. They are fast learners and particularly receptive to learning by doing, so I try to speak as little as possible.

Teaching in a group setting is particularly demanding for string players, but fortunately I have not just Jon Rose and Jean-Michel making the rounds—demonstrating, correcting, encouraging, and clowning as the moment requires. I also have a teacher or teacher’s assistant that accompanies each group, and they are learning with their students. One day this week, the principal, Deborah Finn, popped in and gave it a go.

The enthusiasm of the younger students for circling a small table near the end of each class whilst playing rolling chords on their instruments is, if anything, increasing—as is the speed with which they roll the chords and the pace at which they race around. They make a big sound.

Meanwhile, the high school students have mastered a number of complex hip-hop rhythms and have begun to share their own rhythmic ideas for us to learn.

On my “off” time, I’ve recorded some early-morning dawn choruses nearby, at both Turkey Creek and Mistake Creek. I also transcribed a recording of pied butcherbirds that Jon made here last year and performed it for the students with the recording: first the birds, then me imitating them. It made an impression, and they followed along with the music notation.

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Songs, whispers, and camping trips – Week 2 in Fitzroy Crossing

Tuesday, June 5th, 2018

This article, blog post two, is written by Gillian Howell – Tura’s current Musician in Residence in Fitzroy Crossing, Kimberley, WA. This is part of a three year program supported by Healthway, promoting the Act-Belong-Commit message, and The Ian Potter Foundation.


I had several creative projects running in tandem this week. Monday morning kicked off with the Senior class: one very skilled guitarist, a beginner guitarist and a beginner bassist (and me on clarinet). The previous week I’d shared Steve Reich’s ‘Electric Counterpoint’ with the main guitarist and on Monday we decided to create an original piece made up of layers of melodic fragments, following (roughly) the chord structure in Reich’s 3rd movement. It was an intensive 3 hours of careful listening, mimicking, and then evolving our own ideas and exploring ways of layering them.

Next I worked with the two Year 4-5-6 classes (about 23 students in all). We spent an hour and forty minutes composing a song about Jandamarra, leader of the Bunuba people’s resistance against the invading pastoralists in the late 1890s. I’d imagined we might only write 2 verses and a chorus (partly because the students are investigating the Jandamarra story across the whole of this term, and I thought the song we wrote together might accrue additional verses over the course of the term). However, we completed five verses and a chorus! The creative forces are strong in this group.

Fitzroy Valley District High School students

The Jandamarra project was my main focus this week. I worked with one class to develop an energetic and rhythmic drum piece to represent an ambush and shoot-out at Windjana Gorge, and with the second class to create a very atmospheric instrumental soundscape of Jandamarra’s retreat into a secret cave, where his ancestors “sang away his pain”, healed his wounds, and bestowed magical powers upon him, so that he could “appear and disappear like a ghost” and “fly like a bird”.

I also continued working with each of the classes in the primary school, working alongside the school’s Performing Arts teacher. On Tuesday I worked with the children in the Special Needs group, and we explored the different ways we could create melodies by dividing the chime bars and wah-wah tubes among everyone in the group.

Another concurrent project/relationship in development this residency was with the Baya Gawiy Early Learning Centre (part of Marninwarntikura Women’s Resource Centre). I’d spent several mornings last week hanging out with the oldest group (known as Jambila, or baby barramundi group), observing their creative play and interactions with environment and with each other, and participating in music sessions led by a local musician and one of their teachers. Through these observations I developed an idea for what I call a ‘journey’ project, where the children go on a journey through the music, but also enact the journey with their bodies and through using different parts of the available space (e.g. indoors, outdoors, sand, trees, shade, etc).  On Wednesday morning I took the group on a ‘camping journey’. I’d composed some simple call-and-response songs for us to sing together—complete with actions—and a number of ‘events’ (such as creeping past a sleeping snake and jumping one by one over a sleeping crocodile) to help create the feeling of an exciting and adventurous journey. We also played instruments (frog guiros and wah-wah-tubes), ‘slept’ on a mat under the stars, and got chased by a crocodile as we walked back ‘home’.

Gillian Howell with the Jambila group

‘Sleeping under the stars’ – Gillian Howell with the Jambila group

I’m hoping that this journey workshop model might provide additional inspiration for the music activities already happening in the kindergarten with the local musician and teacher. Next time I’m back we can hopefully develop some more material together.

On Thursday morning I worked with the Senior students again. One of the group has been doing an internship at the Nindilingarri Studio; another has a part-time job at the local radio station. The latter asked if we could help create some ‘atmospheric’ music that could be used to enhance locally-produced radio programs and interviews, so the Senior students and I decided we could record some ideas in the studio and give their classmate (the one doing the internship at the studio) a chance to apply his emerging recording engineer skills to task of recording some more unconventional percussion sounds. It was a very creative morning, where we recreated some of the experimental and unorthodox sounds we’d put into our ‘Wet Season’ composition during my residency in 2017.

In the evenings this week I created an accompanying soundscape that could represent the cool, dark, echoing dampness of the cave in which Jandamarra hid, and where he heard the voices of his ancestors urging him on. To make this, I asked the children to thing about what the ancestors might have said to Jandamarra at that time. What might he have wanted them to say, after all his efforts, courage, and suffering? The children had many suggestions:

We’re gonna calm you down.

Mulla I can see your paining.

We will heal you. We gonna fix your shoulder.

Never give up.

And my favourites: We’re proud of you for having a go. (So stoic. So understated). And: You’re still alive! You’re still alive!

I recorded the children whispering these lines one by one, and also whispering Jandamarra’s name. We learned how to do a ‘stage whisper’ and experimented with different ways of saying the words – slowly and spookily, more urgently and dramatically, and so on.

The residency ended on Friday with a sharing and filming of the 4-5-6 students’ ‘Jandamarra’ project. This also contibruted to National Reconciliation Week and its theme for 2018, Don’t keep history a mystery.

We presented their music in the school’s performing arts studio, adding fresh coloured gels to the lighting rig, and transforming what had been a fairly unadorned ‘black box’ into a far more theatrical and atmospheric performance space. I was so proud of the students. We’d worked incredibly hard to bring three distinctive and highly original pieces of music into existence, in the space of just five days and four teaching occasions.

I was also delighted to hear the students sing the song they’d composed with so much energy. I sensed a strong sense of ownership of the song, pride in their words and melody, and pride in the story they were telling. Plus, it’s a catchy song, and fun to sing. Nothing more satisfying than hearing children sing a song they like in big, strong voices!

I’m en route back to Melbourne now, but already looking forward to my next residency in Fitzroy Crossing in just a couple of months time.


4 June 2018 | Gillian Howell – Fitzroy Crossing Artist in Residence

The story of Jandamarra, as composed by students in Years 4,5 and 6, Fitzroy Valley Distric High School

[Chorus] Jandamarra, Bunuba warrior

Hero of the Kimberley

He fought for the rights of the Bunaba people

Leading them to victory.

[Verse 1] He learned to shoot from a galloping horse

Boss Lukin called him Pigeon.

But the stations’s fences stopped his people hunting, fishing, living.

[Chorus]

[Verse 2] He charmed police with his cheeky grin

And helped them catch his uncle.

But Ellemarra fixed his eye on him:

“Remember who you are.”

[Chorus]

[Verse 3] Pigeon planned a mighty ambush

At Windjana Gorge

His flesh came off with a ricochet

And into the cave he crawled away…

[Chorus]

[Verse 4] He came out of the cave with his bullet wounds healed

As a man of magic power.

He could fly through the air and disappear

Like a shadow or a ghost. And he had no fear.

[Chorus]

[Verse 5] That mapurn* man from the Pilbara

Helped the police to catch him.

He was crying as he took aim.

Jandamarra died in his own creation place.

[Chorus]

[Verse 6] Right throughout the warrior’s life

Women were always there.

Mother, sisters, daughters, wives,

Helping him fight so the country could be theirs… AGAIN.

[Chorus]

*mapurn = magic man

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Update from Fitzroy Crossing – Artist in Residence Gillian Howell

Monday, May 28th, 2018

This article is written by Gillian Howell – Tura’s current Musician in Residence in Fitzroy Crossing, Kimberley, WA. This is part of a three year program supported by Healthway, promoting the Act-Belong-Commit message, and The Ian Potter Foundation.


Residencies are always full of surprises and unexpected turns and it’s good to build in time to let things unfold according to their own rhythm and direction. I’ve now finished the first week of my second residency in Fitzroy Crossing, and it’s been a week of reconnecting with some of the people and groups I worked with in September 2017, catching up on what’s new and what’s changed, and firing up some new relationships and creative projects.

First stop the Marninwarntikura Women’s Resource Centre and their trauma-informed programming supporting women in the Fitzroy Valley. Last time I was here, Marnin (as the centre is known) had initiated a series of weekly Nurturing Nights for local women, creating a beautiful, peaceful, supportive space where women could come to relax, talk with each other, and share a meal. I developed activities around ‘music and healing’ for this program, introducing instruments with potential to steady heart-rates and respiration, and creative ways of coming together and sharing experiences through simple, quiet songs. During those first Music and Healing sessions, I was focused on the adult women. In this week’s session, I found that there was tremendous value in me working more directly with the children. When their children that came to the evenings along with their mums were engaged and absorbed in exploring these beautiful instruments and their sounds, their mums were free to speak with each other and focus on those conversations. What’s more, the children’s music-making had the added effect of ‘masking’ the aural space, creating more privacy for the conversations. The sounds we made were not loud, but they created aural ‘baffles’, behind which difficult conversations could take place. So we learned a new (or additional) role for music in the Nurturing Nights this last week.

Photo taken by one of the children participating in the Music and Healing session at Marnin – a particularly dramatic abstract shot of an energy chime.

Much of my time each day is spent with young people. Most mornings this week I’ve been at Baya Gawiy, the beautiful, purpose-built early learning centre run by Marnin for the Fitzroy Valley’s youngest kids. I rock up with my ukulele, chat or play with the children and their teachers, and offer a song or two each visit. Most importantly, I’ve been connecting with one staff member and her dad who have started writing original songs for the children. The songs including words any of the five local languages of Fitzroy Crossing, as well as Kriol and English, attesting to the commitment to keeping the languages alive and in use in daily life. We are planning to develop some music-based ‘journey’ workshops for early years together. I’ve made a start on one that I’ll present next week.

Marnin Music and Healing Session

Up at the Fitzroy Valley District High School (which includes primary as well as secondary classes), I’ve led music workshops with each of the primary classes. I’ve also spent time with the Language and Culture team of Indigenous teachers, learning more about their program and the innovative ways that they integrate language and cultural knowledge into the learning programs of each age group. Together with the upper primary teachers, we’ve devised a composition project for next week that will develop 2-3 pieces of original music depicting events in the life of Jandamarra, a Bunuba man and legendary hero of the Kimberley who led the Bunuba people’s resistance against pastoralist expansion and land appropriation in the 1890s. This ties in beautifully with the theme for National Reconciliation Week 2018 (27 May – 3 June): “Don’t keep history a mystery. Learn. Share. Grow.”

Plus there are some interesting musical conversations happening with the Senior students that I worked with last year, including a recording project in the offing for next week. All of these projects engage in different ways with the central goals of the residency, to use music as a way to encourage participation and engagement with new things and ideas (‘Act’); explore identity, place and belonging (‘Belong’); and to support individuals to experiment, dream big, make plans, and initiate (‘Commit’). All in all, there is a lot going on and it is great to be back in the Fitzroy Valley.


28 May 2018 | Gillian Howell – Fitzroy Crossing Artist in Residence

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