Success Beyond The Score

Today, it’s Melody’s turn to be under the spotlight. She’s a featured vocalist with the Notebenders big band, whose voice has been praised for being smooth and angelic on the high notes when singing classical songs and jazz.

During the Evening Showcase last year, she had this to say about Time For My Music:

[…] Time For My Music is like a sisterhood, a fellowship. It’s togetherness, a way to put ourselves out in the world as musicians together. 

[…] Millicent has a wonderful gift, a very open heart. She’s very patient with us. I can see that she gives, she goes beyond the mile, many more times than that. I’m truly grateful, also, for the support that she receives in doing this from the family, and for the support of the group. It’s one of the reasons I’m standing here, and I’d like to thank Patricia because, when I started to meet up with the community bands and the Notebenders, it was Patricia who told me about Cafemnee, which was a forerunner to Time For My Music. So thank you a

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Players of over 20 orchestras across the UK have joined forces with the Musicians Union to demand that the government addresses the lack of streaming royalties. While streaming services have made music more accessible than ever, most of the money that they earn never reaches the people who perform the music. This is a particularly harrowing issue with non-featured musicians, including session and orchestral players, as the viola player Rachel Bolt explains in this reel:

 

 

 

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The Musicians Union has assessed that the solution lies on updating the copyright law. As it currently stands, streaming services must give part of their revenue to copyright owners, who are mainly record labels and publishers. Changing it in a way that guarantees equitable remuneration for streaming income would give musicians their due revenue back, without making the State incur in additional expenses.

You can read ...

The Government is running an independent Curriculum and Assessment Review with the aim to gather perspectives and evidence that can help refresh and update the national curriculum and statutory assessment system in England. The Musicians' Union is responding to it on behalf of its members, submitting arguments in favour of arts and music education, and you can do the same by answering to the review online before Friday, 22nd November.

The Review has a big scope, and it's looking for solid evidence and potential solutions to the main problems faced in the education of children and teenagers aged 5 to 19. If you feel that you don’t have an informed opinion to contribute to the discussion regarding one specific section of this massive enterprise, it's alright: you can answer only to what matters to you, and your opinion will be taken into account anyway.

The Musicians' Union has highlighted the sections more relevant to arts and music education, and has some advice on how to respond to ...

The Time For My Music evening showcase on Tuesday 29th October was fabulous. The women stepped up to the mark and delivered a performance that blew everybody's minds. They were glamorous and classy, engaging the audience (a full house of it!) to share hours of great music played with their hearts and souls. Truly, the event couldn't possibly have gone better. 

The significance of this achievement goes beyond the stage. The women didn't only perform at the evening showcase, but they actually organised it and produced it. They learned what's needed to put on a show, who to contact, and how to go about things. Using her experience producing the Not Just Jazz shows, Millicent guided them and provided them with the necessary skills so they can do it again by themselves in the future, being transparent with them in regard to location options and regulations, costs, etc.

The show is over, but the learning continues. There are things that still need to be taken care of, evaluations to do, an...

If you're a listener of our podcast Success Beyond The Score, you might be well acquainted with the work of Louise Dengate. A native of Stratford upon Avon, she's a singer, songwriter, vocal coach, choir director and music agent. Her extensive experience in all these roles has given her a lot of insight and knowledge, which combined with her love for music and her genuine interest for helping others in their music journey, make her a wonderful tutor and teacher.

On Saturday 19th October 2024 at the Stratford Methodist Church, you'll have the chance to experience this first hand by attending Louise's Gospel Choir Workshop with members of her Crystal Gospel Choir. For just £80.00 per person, you'll get three hours of intense immersion, learning vocal techniques, harmony work and performance skills. It's a very good opportunity and there's not a lot of time left, so be sure of telling your friends or colleagues who might be interested, and book your place(s) following this link.

We have a date and a place! On Tuesday 29th October 2024, the women of Time For My Music will perform live at the MAC Theatre of Birmingham. Get ready for an evening of jazz, soul, gospel and reggae by these accomplished emerging musicians, in a show that’s sure to warm your heart in the midst of these progressively colder autumn days.

Tickets are only £10.00 plus a small booking fee. If you are part of a group of five people or more, please send an e-mail to [email protected] in order to arrange a discount

Get your tickets here.

Don't forget to share this information with your friends and family. We're looking forward to seeing you all at the theatre!

Our online community for emerging musicians, Time For My Music, is preparing their first ever live concert in the city of Birmingham, UK. It’s been an exciting and inspiring process so far. The participants have brought a lot of energy, ideas and dreams to the table. For example, they’ve suggested music pieces that they’ve always wanted to have in their repertoire. Without revealing the whole set list, we can say that Stevie Wonder’s Superstition and Bob Marley’s One Love are among the selected songs. They’re sounding great already!

In regard to the date, we’re aiming for some time in November. Besides the music, though, there are many things we have to figure out first. One of them is how to pay for the expenses of the event. While we will sell tickets, we’d only be able to cover all the costs if we did so for a price that we consider too high. This means that we need to compliment ticket sales with other forms of funding.

To start looking for a solution, our director Millicent atte...

The main instrument of any musician is their own body. From the brain to the limbs, to the internal organs, to the skin, different parts of the body interact with musical instruments, with other bodies and the world around them to create music. It's no wonder, then, that musicians and their health are a topic of interest in medicine.

An interesting example was presented by the British Dental Museum this year with the exhibition The Challenge of the Perfect Embouchure. Defined as "the way in which a player applies their mouth to the mouthpiece of a brass or wind instrument, especially as it affects the production of the sound," embouchure is critical for players of these kinds of instruments.

The exhibition was dedicated to Maurice Porter, a dentist and amateur clarinettist who became an authority on embouchure during the 50s and 60s. One of the first doctors to pay attention to how poor dental or facial health was specifically detrimental to wind and brass players, Porter wrote some ...

Here is the transcription of episode 6 of season 3 of the podcast "Success Beyond The Score". Happy reading!

- Watch the video of the episode here: YouTube

- Listen to the audio of the episode here: Kajabi

PODCAST INTRO:

Hello, hello, hello! I hope you can hear me. I'm just checking my mic levels. Of course, if you can't, please put a message in the chat. Now, today is scorching. It's super hot here, which is kind of nice! We don't get a lot of really hot weather, and then we complain, and then it gets cold, and we want the hot weather back. But it's great. So, at some point, I may have to put a fan on, because I've just kind of kept all the windows closed to stop the noise on the microphone. Let me just make that a bit closer to me. Yep. And, hopefully that should work. Just let me know in the chat if everything is fine.

Okay, today we have got an interesting hot topic, and that is: is playing for free a contradiction for musicians?

Thinking of this title, I thought, well, y...

The boom of generative AI brings difficult challenges to the music industry. In an effort to keep regulations on par with the development of this technology, the Musicians' Union is pushing for copyright law to be upheld in relation to it, and for new rights to be introduced that will protect musicians and music creators from any unauthorised use of their works and performances.

Generative AI needs massive amounts of data —in the case of music, the input is millions of songs and sound samples— to train with, before it can generate pieces from given prompts. This data so far has been collected without explicit consent by its original, human creators. Developers argue that their LLMs (large language models, generally referred to as "AI") learn from the source data in a way similar to humans, therefore they can't incur in copyright infringement. However, these systems are unable to create their own ideas. Instead, they search for patterns in pre-existing music so, when they get a prompt,...