Aardman and BPM collaborate for Bristol’s secondary school students

Bristol Plays Music provide music tuition and workshops in 91 per cent of Bristol’s primary schools. Their latest project sees them expand their work into secondary schools, in partnership with Aardman, creating free resources for teachers to plan lessons around.

“We spent much of the past 18 months finding out what would help secondary schools keep music in the in the curriculum,” said Phil Castang, head of Bristol Plays Music.

“Many of them said good quality resources and support in training would help, so we went away and worked with those teachers to write a curriculum to help bring their schools to life.”

Having resources written by teachers ensures their quality, says Ben England, creative producer at Bristol Play Music. “It’s from an authentic source, and it’s been tried and tested,” he says. “As teachers see that they’re getting good materials from us, they are more inclined to volunteer to help us write the next resources. It’s a virtuous circle.”

The new Wallace & Gromit Film Music Unit will support secondary school students aged 11-16 to create a musical score to the film A Matter of Loaf and Death over the course of six lessons. The work will help them to learn film composing techniques in a practical and applied way. For example, the first lesson involves young people playing instruments and improvising to the clips they’re watching.

“A lot of people had said it would be excellent to talk to Aardman,” Ben continues. “I’d done film music work with children before and it had gone very well – I think it’s the combination of visual elements and the immediate impact of playing along. Wallace and Gromit in particular is packed with visual cues, and it fits so well with music to emphasise the ‘hit points’ – like when a character falls off a cliff with a bump.”

“Aardman were very generous, letting us use three clips from one of their films. We’re all really excited by it, especially getting to use the materials. It was quite surreal: here we are in our little office in Bristol talking to major movie studios!”

This new programme comes after the announcement of further budget cuts by the UK Government, bringing the total cut from the schools budget to £2.8bn since 2015. However, Phil Castang remains optimistic about the future of Bristol’s music education. “It’s a very challenging environment at the moment, but Bristol has such a buoyant music scene and a huge number of adults continue to play music after education.

“There’s a huge music culture in the city, and the support of organisations like Colston Hall, St George’s and Creative Youth Network makes a huge difference. We’re going to keep it strong.”

Bristol Plays Music have also introduced additional learning units to their primary music curriculum, and are planning a range of GCSE music listening exercises.

“We have tried really hard to keep music in the curriculum and to provide high quality enrichment opportunities,” Phil says. “We’re proud that we’ve kept schools engaged by being creative, despite the backdrop of the cuts.”

Schools can download the free resources by visiting www.bristolplaysmusic.org/teach/music-curriculum-bristol/secondary-curriculum-wallace-and-gromit.