Joy overwhelms you

The idea for Starling Sessions was in my mind from as early as 2017. I’d been involved in running Tandem Festival, a local festival of arts, environmental activism, and social action, and an international music program called Ethno England, which was part of this global network of music camps for young people. I'd seen the impact that musical connection could have. I went to some of these camps as a participant in places as far away as India and met people my age playing music from all corners of the world. And I did learn a lot about myself through that. I applied for a City Council grant in February 2020, and then the world turned upside down in March 2020. During the pandemic, I found time to think about career development. I wanted to get more confident in my leadership skills, so I applied for a ‘Develop Your Creative Practice’ grant from the Arts Council to develop my skills as a music facilitator and workshop leader. I successfully resubmitted the City Council grant so I was like, ‘Oh God! I've got to actually do this. How scary!’ I mean, all important things are scary, aren't they? 

I thought, ‘I need a co-leader.’ John just seemed like the obvious choice. He gives us a gender balanced team and his background has a lot of therapeutic training in psychodynamic practices. He's got a brilliant, intuitive and theoretical understanding of how groups function and spotting individuals’ needs, and he’s worked with people who've suffered significant trauma. We'd been performing together in a band for at least eight years, so I asked him and he said yes. We booked a room and made some flyers, and I spent a rainy day wandering up and down the Cowley Road, talking to everyone in every shop and restaurant. I spoke to every cultural group I could think of, and then on 3 November 2021, we sat in the lounge at the East Oxford community centre like, ‘Oh God, is anyone going to come?’ 

We’re now nearly three years on and still running every Thursday night in term-time and regularly get about thirty people. We’ve probably had more than a hundred people who've at least attended once. We have learned more than fifty songs from more than thirty different countries or cultures. We've performed at all sorts of events from the Ashmolean at the One World Fair, in the asylum hotel in Blackbird Leys, Oxford Town Hall, Wood Festival, to a party night at Tap Social. At every one, the sense of joy overwhelms you. Every time we're coming up to a gig, I think John and I are exhausted and thinking, ‘What are we doing? This is so much work,’ and then we do the gig, and we're like, ‘This is why we're doing it.’ 

The group has always been a real mix of musical experiences and abilities. Generally, there'll be something for people who can play melodies, chords, and sing. Before anyone brings a song, we ask them to share it with us privately first, and we have a listen and try to learn it. We think about how much of it we can learn in a session, does it have a nice, easy chorus or a refrain? Is there a tasty little instrumental bit that people are going to pick up easily? We know that we can't always do a faithful, traditional representation of something, because we don't have the instrumentation or the skills. But I hope that we always get something of the essence of it. I like those musical challenges, when you take it to the group and feel the excitement and surprise when people are like, ‘How are we ever going to learn this? This is so far from our experience,’ and then it turns into a banger that everyone loves. I love it when that happens. John and I, we do our best to shape it and steer it, but the point is that everyone is involved, can have their moment, and can feel like we are a collective. Whenever I feel a bit weary, I think about all the wonderful people who are showing up and giving themselves and all their generosity and creativity. It fills me full of energy again. 

From the beginning, I wanted this project to be a resource for refugee and asylum-seeking communities. We're still working out what the best format for enabling that participation is, but we've gone a fair way down that road and made some beautiful friendships and connections. The impression I have is that people who are in the midst of that process don't necessarily get treated with a lot of respect by the system. It's very dehumanizing and they’re completely in limbo, without the ability to work or to offer anything. It feels important to me that we have a space where they have the opportunity to give. That seems to be a real need that is felt. It’s important that we keep trying to create a space where people who are here, however temporarily, feel like they get to be part of Oxford, and have something to offer the city. 

There is always more work to do and improvement to be made. I don't think we're the best that we can be yet. The ideas are never-ending, and that's one of the things about this project that’s been both really heartening and amazing and also exhausting and frustrating. It's brilliant that we're doing something that people are expressing a demand for, but also, we're only two people, with such limited funding. At the moment, we're paying ourselves quite frugally for the session and one morning a week of admin and project management. We probably both spend more like two days a week doing these things. I wrote something like twenty funding bids last year, and I got three successes. There was a period last year where our funding ran out, and for a term we did it completely unpaid because we thought, ‘We can't just stop, we can't take this away.’ That’s one of the reasons why I’m determined to keep pursuing more funding, because while this relies on us putting in unpaid hours, it’s risky. It’s a big aim for the next couple of years, to put us in a more sustainable position. We have a donations platform where anyone can donate, but both of us feel it very important that we don't connect the financial contribution with the attendance. When we're making music, we don't talk about money. Everybody is equally valid to be there. There’s been huge support from OCM, Old Fire Station, and Asylum Welcome. We’ve been supported by a lot of organisations and funders who have put their money where their mouths are. I’m also aware that, as a leadership team, we are both white British people, and that intrinsically limits who we can be. I would love to have a pool of more facilitators, who have a broader cultural heritage representation. 

On a professional level, I’ve gained a huge amount of confidence and experience in workshop facilitation. It's pushed me and expanded my comfort zone no end. Out of doing that, I've been offered work for other organisations doing facilitation and music leading. It's definitely moved my professional work forward a lot. I've just left my only payroll job to go fully freelance, and that's in no small part down to this project showing me that I can be a successful facilitator, and I can go and get more of that work. It’s been very validating. 

On a personal level, I've put more faith in myself. To build a project like this, you just have to go and make friends and build relationships and go to places where you don't know anyone and say, ‘Hi, I like doing music. Do you like doing music?’ and put yourself in a room full of totally new people. I've learned a lot about myself and I've learned an awful lot working with John. We have some really open and revealing conversations where we both push each other to understand ourselves better and how we work as a team. 

On a social level, I feel more connected with more of Oxford now, but I also have a broader social network of people from different places now, because they're my friends too. I think Oxford can be quite a difficult place to live. Sometimes it's quite a difficult place to be a creative. But the support from all different parts of the city that's come for this project, you know, the arts organisations and the residents that have stood behind it and said, ‘Yes, we're going to support this, we want to be part of this.’ The sense of connection that's come out of that has been really important in making me feel like this is a place that's important to me, where I feel rooted, connected and supported. I always anticipated there being some impacts that were more than musical, but I don't think I anticipated the level of mutual support network coming out of it, that it would become this real community who, outside of the sessions, answer each other's calls for help. 

I feel like I’ve come to the world with this hopeful, potentially naive-sounding hand out to say, ‘Maybe we can make a space where we’re all just friends and we play music together,’ and the city of Oxford has said, ‘Yes we can! You can have that hope.’ We can be welcoming, and kind, and generous, and appreciate each other for all the different things that we have to bring and be joyous about it. So, it may make me tired sometimes, and it may be a large amount of work, but it revives my faith in humanity, and hope, every week.