Benedetti Foundation Newsletter January 2021

JANUARY 2021

BENEDETTI FOUNDATION NEWSLETTER

Happy New Year to you all!

We hope you all had a restful holiday period and are feeling ready and excited for a brand-new year working together. As we reflect on the events of 2020, we want to say a huge thank you for being a part of the Foundation this year. Your commitment, dedication, enthusiastic participation and willingness to get involved and have a go has been incredible. We have loved getting to know so many of you from all across the world.

Planning for a new year always presents lots of opportunities to not only develop the projects already underway, but also to be innovative and create new experiences. We have lots of exciting things in store for this year and are looking forward to getting started.

Message from Nicky Welcome back to a new year with the Benedetti Foundation. We are so looking forward to working with you again this year.

2020 was a year of change and of challenge, but also one of strength and focus. I have been continually inspired by the resilience, positivity and determination shown by all of you. This year has brought together so many of us who may not otherwise have met, and we have been truly moved by the messages we received from so many of you throughout the year. Thank you for taking the time to communicate with us and for your continued commitment.

The virtual world has been thrown into the spotlight in ways we could not have envisaged, and has enabled us to connect and share across borders, bringing together a global community. To work with participants from over 75 countries from across the world is something we would otherwise have been unable to deliver.

We hope this year will bring a return, in some form, to live events. As you will read in this newsletter, we are planning a year of virtual sessions and some blended live with virtual experiences for you. We will continue to be committed to building and uplifting this community of musicians, to sharing and making as accessible as possible high quality music education resources and experiences for you all and to supporting and empowering the work of all teachers.

We are delighted to have you as part of our community, and I look forward to meeting as many of you as possible this year.

Love, Nicky x

January - March 2021: News and Updates

Over the weekend of 16-17 January, we are inviting all school age string players to join us for a new year reset, to play together and to explore some new repertoire. There are three levels to choose from: Beginner (pre-grade 1 to approx. Grade 2/3), Intermediate (approx. Grade 3-5ish) and Advanced (approx.

Grade 6+) strings. The final day to register is Sunday 10 January. Over the weekend, we will be focused on a specific piece of repertoire for each group, with preparation videos from your tutors available from the moment you register. We’ll be exploring storytelling, technique, discussing character and interpretation and learning more about ensemble skills. Please visit www.benedettifoundation.org/new-year-sessions to register.

Mini Sessions We are thrilled this week to have opened registration for our Mini Sessions for January to March.

This year, we are planning to share all the Mini Sessions in 3-month groups to help you plan ahead. On our website, you will find they are split in to four categories: School Age Children and Young People Teachers (Instrumental and Classroom) Music Students and Recent Graduates Adult Learners The Mini Sessions are all delivered on Zoom and are short, focused sessions on a specific topic. They cover all sorts of subjects from rhythm basics, to interpretation and analysis, to vibrato and memorisation.

You can view and register for the Mini Sessions here.

Teaching Sessions: Energise, Innovate, Inspire

Launching this year, we are deepening our commitment to the support of teachers. As well as our Mini Sessions and Chat with Us sessions which will run all year round, we have developed dedicated, short courses of teacher training. They run over three weeks and allow teachers to work in a small group, led by one of the Foundation’s tutors, to delve into one specific area of your teaching. Over the year, these sessions will be for instrumental teachers as well as classroom teachers.

The first of these sessions begins in February and is dedicated to Teaching Beginner Violin. Registration for this is now open here.

All the information about these sessions will be hosted on our website here and will be updated with new sessions as they become available.

Coming Soon 'Teaching Primary Music' Within the next few weeks, we will be releasing the first of our new schemes of work for teaching primary music. These are video resources with accompanying lesson plans designed for primary classroom teachers, or those delivering music in primary settings / home schooling, who are not music specialists. Written by Jimmy Rotherham, a primary music specialist, and developed by the Benedetti Foundation team, this will be the first of many new resources for primary schools from us this year.

There are two levels: age 4-7 and age 7-11 and this first one covers the topics of pulse and rhythm.

We will be running dedicated training sessions on their content for teachers who wish to develop more confidence in delivering music in the classroom. These schemes of work will be free for anyone to download. Please keep an eye on our teachers pages of the website for their publication and training dates.

Looking Back On 2020

Since our last newsletter, we are delighted to have delivered the Global Violin Sessions and the Christmas Virtual Sessions as well as many more Mini Sessions 56 in total since they began - including a short, dedicated wellbeing series. We love connecting with you all from across the world – thank you for joining in on these sessions.

Global Sessions

Throughout November and December, we enjoyed an inspirational three weeks working with seven virtuoso violinists from all across the world. Maggie and Mark O’Connor, Tessa Lark, Geza HosszuLegocky, Roby Lakatos, Pekka Kuusisto and Nemanja Radulovic formed the stellar line up of great virtuosos for the first part of our Global Violin Sessions: A Cultural Exchange Part 1. During these sessions, we took a tune written by trumpeter, composer and educator Wynton Marsalis and sent it off on the first part of a journey around the world. We explored how the tune was changed into the folk traditions of four different countries – the USA, Hungary, Finland and Serbia. The musicians changed rhythms, twisted notes, rewrote corners, added instrumentation and colours and effects – and along the way, they taught the participants how they did it. We gained insight into the musical worlds of each tradition, told by the violin. You can watch the final performance here. The Global Violin Sessions will return for part 2 in March/April 2021.

Christmas

We rounded off 2020 in virtual style with the Christmas Virtual Sessions.

Working together on Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, especially arranged for this session by the formidable Ayoub Sisters, we loved meeting participants in Zoom sectionals, seeing all your costumes and decorations, receiving your creative activities inspired by Lucy’s Creative Christmas Crackers and watching your video submissions for the final film.

We are so grateful to Classic FM who premiered the recording on Christmas Eve. We have it on good authority that it was so loved by the team at Classic FM, it was played more than once that day!

If you would like to watch the music video, you can view it here.

Benedetti Foundation Book Our books for young string players and string teachers are available on our website here. These books were first produced for our live sessions at the start of 2020, and include Top Ten Tips, advice, anecdotes, articles from Nicky and the Benedetti Foundation tutors and supporters, including Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Elin Manahan Thomas.

The books are available to download and all profits go straight back to developing the sessions and supporting young musicians to attend both online and eventually in person.

Supporting the Foundation The Benedetti Foundation is a registered charity. We receive no government funding, and all our activity is made possible through the generous donations of individuals, corporate sponsorship and trusts & foundations. Your support throughout the year has allowed us to continue to put on this array of projects for our young people, students, teachers and adult learners.

In these tough times, we really appreciate all the support you have shown us.

As we continue to plan our innovative and exciting programme of sessions for 2021, if you would like to make a donation of any size, please click here to visit our Support page. If you would like to make a regular donation to support our work, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please contact Fiona Bassett, Administrator, in the first instance: fiona@benedettifoundation.org

Social Media Update You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and now also TikTok where we’ll be posting regular challenges and activities.

Keeping in Touch We love receiving your emails, videos, letters, and your comments online. Please keep in touch with us. You can always write to us via: info@benedettifoundation.org.uk and messages on social media.

We are looking forward to working with you all again soon. In the meantime, keep safe and keep practising.

The Benedetti Foundation is a Scottish company limited by guarantee with charitable status.

Company number: 636675. Charity number: SC049688