By Mike Chunn

The proof is in the pudding. The reality is in the grooves.

Luckily CDs have grooves…..that last rivulet in which digital noughts and ones can sit comfortably watching each other as they spin around.

They must notice too their high-flying friends zooming at the speed of light across space and wires delivering songs like so many drops of rain in a monsoon across the world-wide web. And we are in a new world.

There are many schools across New Zealand out in the market place selling albums right now. They sell them as CDs and internet downloads. Those schools are happily embroiled in the Enterprising Music Competition.

What are these albums? They are albums of songs written by their school mates. Sung by their school mates. Played by their school mates. And that’s just the start as those albums are also posted up on websites for downloading and promoted on sites like YouTube and Facebook and MySpace and the techniques and beautiful ambitions of those who seek a ‘knowing’ audience ready to listen to new songs – they stand up and SHOUT it and take it into the streets! Check out the Waikato Diocesan School album “2 The Nation” which won the Rockshop Album of the Year in the Enterprising Music Competition. A wonderful array of songs by new songwriters.

There is a new intelligence out there. People seem to be happy to hear a song they’ve never heard before written by someone they’ve never heard of. Witness the song “Let Me Go” by 17 yr old Maria Schryvers of Life Abundant School in Kaitaia. She entered a demo of her song in our Lion Foundation Songwriting Competition and it was picked in the Top 50 and recently recorded at Andrew Buckton’s Studio 203. We put it up on Soundcloud and told our friends on Facebook to check it out.

It has been listened to over 1,600 times and the countries where it has been heard are NZ, Australia, UK, Kenya, USA, Canada, Germany, Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Sweden, France, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Bulgaria. Now it’s your turn.

All this recording. Recording is nothing new here in 2011. But it’s penetration into the musical adventures of NZ schools is fairly thin. Why is this? Let’s go back to the early 60s when Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones was a teenager. In his recent book “Life” he says:

“..to play the blues was like a jailbreak out of those meticulous bars with the notes crammed in like prisoners… like sad faces”.

While crotchets and quavers sitting on a page of manuscript do look encaged, their purpose in the performance of music does seem to have a fierce majority standing in the music curriculums of today. And so it seems, many songwriters and performers at schools avoid taking music as a subject as they want to project their musical selves using their own imagination and skills to display their own ‘take’ on the music they are playing. Surely this is to be expected in a world where music played by performers in the streets and stages is not about reading scores and repeating someone else’s arrangement. And while there are schools with music teachers whose contemporary sensibilities encourage and celebrate true originality especially in songwriting, there are those that don’t.

Manuscripts and scores have a sure and safe place in music. If a concert band wants to play a spirited rendition of “In The Mood” they will have charts and off they go. But if we are talking about original songs that add to our emerging NZ music tradition then the notation of today is a recording. Instead of eyes – the players use ears. And so it is imperative that ALL schools realise that recording systems and a knowledge of recording and studio producing is a craft that must be embraced.