Online Singalong Sessions with Laura

SINGALONG WITH LAURA

Do you love music?

Are you looking for something different to do?

Singing old favourite songs (or even making up new ones!) can unlock memories and help to build new ones.

Community Musician Laura Cousins has more than 20 years' experience of singing and making music with people from all walks of life.

Making music together can help provide relief from  stress, boredom, or isolation. 

You can join in by using Zoom on your computer, smartphone or tablet. No one has to be able to see you if you don't want them to, and no one else will be able to hear you singing, except - perhaps! - your neighbours. 

Lyric sheets available on request.

Email Laura for more details. 

Online Drumalong Sessions With Laura

 

Drumalong with Laura!

Are you feeling more than usually stressed?

Do you enjoy playing a drum? Or even just the idea of it?

Join Community Musician Laura Cousins for a monthly on-line drumalong session.

Laura provides gentle (or even not-so-gentle!) play-along rhythms for you to tune in and entrain to. There may also be some very simple games to play.

No one else can hear you playing, so there's absolutely no need to worry about what it all sounds like. Unless your neighbours are unusually sensitive, that is. 

This activity is intergenerational and very suitable for families!

Join me on the first and third Wednesday of every month at 5.30pm. 

The session lasts for about an hour. 

Whilst this activity has previously been free of charge I am now requesting donations from participants to help keep the sessions going. Contact me if you would like to pay by bank transfer, or donate via PayPal below.

I can supply invoices/receipts as required. 

Email Laura to get your access codes and to find out how you can donate to keep this activity going.

Arts, Crafts and Dignity in Care

I'm delighted to have been involved in this project, which brought together care and arts practitioners from Dorset, Somerset, Northern France, Belgium and Holland in a new experiment to discover how the innovative sTimul experience can impact on the provision of creative workshops in care homes, day centres and other settings all over the EU.

The sTimul immersive training session I attended in Belgium last year was designed to give practitioners a real sense of what it might be like to have a disability and to require support with everything from meal-times to leisure activities.

Watch this video that describes the experiences of a group of care-givers at the sTimul experience a few years ago:



In the course of my two days there, I assumed the role of an elderly woman with a learning disability, who had virtually no speech. The experience was very challenging, and provided me with a real insight into what caregivers and support workers have to do.

Above all it left me with the absolute conviction that my approach to musical inclusion is the model that best supports people with a wide range of abilities.

I hear you, my friend. But I don't know what you're saying.

I switch on the digital recorder and direct a few pleasantries towards my client ("K") whilst I set up a djembe, some bongoes, and a tambourine. I tie on some ghungroo leg bells. K does not speak, not really, not in the usual way. He speaks with odd words here and there, movements of his hands and his legs and occasionally his head. He opens his eyes to look at me but the orbits are clouded with cataracts. He sniffs the air instead.

It's important to always wear the same perfume when I come here.

I tell him that the tambourine is on the floor, just in front of his toes. He explores it with his foot, then kicks it towards me. I thank him. I begin to play a drum. I'd like to say 'by mutual consent', but the only way I can judge an affirmative from K is if a negative is not forthcoming. I mirror what he's doing with his hands, as well as his rhythmic sniffing and exhalations. We've made music from that kind of thing before.

He vocalises. Two noises, which I've decided before now to take as encouragement. I move the tambourine back to him and he plays it, then kicks it. I begin to play it instead. I make up a song - "Foot on the floor, hands on the chair. I can hear your music playing, everywhere." This is a variation of an old favourite.

In the recording I can hear K's incessant movement in his chair. He only stops moving when he's asleep.

The words fade out and I play the bongoes as well as the djembe. I get a little too ambitious and lose what I am doing. Then I relax, phase out. I'm in the zone. Hopefully K is there with me too. His foot reaches for the tambourine again.

I try to follow the random patterns his hands and feet make but I've never managed to both watch him and "play his movements". I can only manage an approximation of it. The rhythm roams all over the place, every now and then returning to my holding form. I feel brave enough to bring the bongoes in again and sing, based on some of his vocal noises.

K begins to look more relaxed. His hands stray to his belly, a sign that he's sleepy.  A transition point will come soon. Something will ... happen. Three times more his toes touch the tambourine.

Back to the "foot on the floor" song, in an effort to stave off the looming transition stage. My playing, I realise now, sounds hesitant. I'm expecting K to start complaining (which is what normally happens) and I begin to sound nervous. After 12 minutes the outburst comes. He could be shouting "Tired"; he could be shouting "Toilet." I try to sound calm but firm - I don't want to finish the session early. This is typically what his old music therapist did, every time he began shouting or braying. K never had a session with her that lasted more than 20 minutes.

I've already told K that I won't do that, and I have the full backing of the support staff he lives with. This shouting, they tell me, is K's "behaviours." I know that. I know he is communicating, and feel lousy at still not really knowing what he's telling me, so stridently. The staff insist that he is 'just trying it on', whatever the hell that means, but sometimes I still get uncomfortable .. is he bored? Is he fed up? Is he just trying to manipulate his environment in any small way he can? Is he looking for attention? I assure him that I am still there, and listening, and that I can hear him.

After a little while he calms, settles, and we return to the music. It's as if nothing happened. The session continues for the entire half hour without any further incidents. But I am left wondering, again, if I have done the right thing.

(from a session on a Monday morning, early in January 2012)

Musical Landscape.

"Musical Landscape" by Kass Spencer-Mathews

My client Eddie is a young man, about 23 years old. He lives with two other men about the same age. Eddie is autistic.

He loves to take my cheap keyboard and make it play a pre-programmed rhythm called "Swing". Very simple. Bass drum, ride cymbal and one single lonesome snare drum beat in every 16. Rather hypnotic. Eddie loves this beat. He'll hold the keyboard up close to his face and play one or two notes continuously together. He has also chosen the way these notes should sound - not just the basic piano sound that is the keyboard's default setting when it is switched on, but another sound, one that Eddie has chosen specifically for his purposes.

For a few weeks of this, that was actually the problem - my trying to determine Eddie's "purpose". I found it impossible to engage with him when he was doing this. He seemed happiest in his own autistic landscape of repeating patterns and dissonant extended tones with no release. I tried all kinds of things, I realise now, to see if I had his attention.

Then, I just let go of wanting that.

I accompanied the electronic beat on a drum - normally my beloved small djembe, or a darabouka that is portable as Eddie tends to move around his house a great deal in the course of our sessions. I checked in with him regularly to make sure he didn't mind my following him. But, I just play. Today I also played my wooden flute - and then, best of all, used my voice.

As part of my Lifemusic training, I had one whole day in the company of vocal guru Jenny Roditi and it changed the way I think about my voice. I now know that my 'range' is not measurable in traditional Western musical terms, because I can make all kinds of noises at the two opposite ends of my register that are still valuable, just not recognised, by musical norms in Europe. (Listen to women singing Chinese Opera or an Indian Classical singer - they use their voices so differently from us .. or at the other end of the scale, how about Inuit Throat Singing?)

Anyway, I now have very few inhibitions about how I use my voice. Sometimes the sounds I make may sound comical or purile to Western ears, but none of my clients judge me.

As Eddie played, I matched the note/s that he was playing vocally. Sometimes I harmonised with the notes.

At this point, to my surprise and delight, he moved his fingers around the keyboard. It was a moment of musical connection. He responded to my voice.

We went into the kitchen. I improvised rhythms on the lid of the waste bin, and the paper-towel dispenser, and patting the rhythm on the counter top he was leaning against. He ran the back of his thumbnail over the striations of the keyboard where the speakers are enclosed, and I did the same with a spoon on the draining board.

I wish it were easier for me to convey the sense of wonder I was getting from all of this. I simply had to adjust my thinking: Instead of fretting about Eddie's willingness to join me in my musical world, I merely took a tiny step towards him and ended up in his musical world. And the next thing I knew, it was our musical world.

This is a revelation, but a painfully obvious one. Of course this is what I am supposed to do, isn't it? So why does it still feel like such a damascene moment to me? I think that because, with every new client, I need to go through this process of wondering where it is that I am going to 'meet' that person. It's a journey. During that traveling time, I can often fret that I am not getting anywhere or achieving anything.

I need to remember to trust the process. Trust the music to make itself, though me and through my client.  If I can just let go, and allow myself to be led -  blindfolded if needs be - into the other person's musical landscape.