Classroom workshopping - facilitating whole class composition

In the context of Musical Futures, non-formal teaching builds on the practices of community musicians, transferring aspects of this into the more formal music classroom. With an emphasis on supporting teachers to act as facilitators of large group composition, the Musical Futures classroom workshopping model was the first in a series of clear frameworks to encourage teachers to attempt this approach, then to integrate and embed it into classroom practice. 
A Guide to Classroom Workshopping
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The techniques highlighted in the following introductory video are those developed at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in the UK. Over the past two decades they have established solid pedagogical foundations for this type of work, exemplified by their CONNECT Ensembles, a prestigious musical outreach project that involved both young musicians in the community and also undergraduate musicians from TheGuildhall.
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The introductory film was made at Morpeth Secondary School, with kind permission of the then Head of Music, Peter Romhany and his students.

You can find a wealth of free resources to support classroom workshopping on the Musical Futures UK website. Please don't buy any premium resources, these are provided free as part of our Musical Futures International workshops where relevant.

Getting started

This approach works with any instruments you have available. However it is advisable to have a piano/keyboard/guitar, bass and drums for your strongest players to help to hold the ensemble together. 

A cowbell or equally loud percussion instrument is also really useful to bash out the pulse as all the students start to play together! 

​Finally, don't forget the warm ups and icebreakers that help students to get better at playing together, creating an ensemble and a shared space to play music together and rehearse essential musical skills as a whole class!

Classroom workshopping in practice

Delegates in this video taken at our introductory workshops in Bangkok in 2017 took it in turns to direct the group and to take the music in new directions all as the group continued to play!

 Building on the original model - Groove your Classroom and New Grooves

Groove your classroom provides a bridge between Just Play and the Musical Futures classroom workshopping approach. 

With the help of play along videos if needed, Groove takes drum kit rhythms and places them across common classroom percussion instruments and shows how these can be delivered in practical ways that are both musical and theoretical .

The classroom workshop is then built around those grooves giving the piece a particular groove or energy from which to build the whole class composition.

​The following shows a class of students taking a groove from a song, at the end of this process the groove can be used to create a completely new piece of music built on ideas from within the group.
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