INCLUDE: Encouraging diversity in music-making

Sue Benson, Managing Trustee of the Great Bowden Recital Trust, gives us an update on their group's involvement with Making Music's INCLUDE programme.

Back in February we hosted the first of our networking sessions for local music groups on the topic of how to encourage more men to take part in music making. Our inspirational speaker Will Prideaux, Director of Peterborough Sings!, talked about the highly successful Men United in Song project and shared some work that his organisation was doing on their website to make it feel more personal and accessible to visitors by focusing on the 'feelings'. We came away with lots of ideas that we were keen to implement.  

The first was to update our communications and website to promote the mental health benefits of music-making. We were very grateful to receive a grant from a local charity to fund the cost of hiring a professional videographer. He spent a lot of time at our rehearsals recording footage of us doing what we do, and we also invited members to share some of their personal experiences of what taking part in our choirs and ensembles means to them. It was humbling to hear the lovely things that they said, and how open they were willing to be about personal struggles, and the outcome is a two-minute video that really gives a sense of who we are as an organisation which we have added to our website and social media.  

We also asked the videographer to create 30-second videos of each of our groups to add to our website. Video can be a very powerful way to show people what they can expect at a rehearsal and to break down some of the barriers that might make people hesitate because they can see what people are wearing, the layout of the room and the smiling faces of people enjoying themselves. We revamped our website using these video headers on each page and also added some quotes from members about how they feel about being involved with their group. This has made our website feel much more welcoming and personal. 

'Men Sing for Movember' group rehearsing

The second thing we did was implement our own project to encourage more men to sing in a choir. 'Men Sing for Movember' ran from September to December alongside our Community Choir and culminated in a fantastic performance at our Christmas Concert alongside our other groups. We were overwhelmed with the response with more than our original target of 30 men signing up with minimal promotion. Most of these men have stayed for the whole project and some are planning to continue as members of our Community Choir in January. They learned four songs in only 12 hours of rehearsals and make a fabulous sound. It has been a very successful project and something we would definitely consider doing again in future.  

We have also done some work on defining the identity of our orchestra. This is a group that is open to anyone of around grade 4 or above which currently has players of a range of experience from grade 8 plus to adult beginners. That can make it quite challenging to describe to potential new members which can be a barrier to recruitment. We were very grateful for support from Elizabeth, the Inclusion Focus Programme Manager, to work through a process to help us to develop a clearer focus. The first step was to carry out an anonymous survey of members to find out what they liked and didn’t like about the current format. We got some very positive and helpful responses which helped to identify a few areas to focus on. Elizabeth then came to a rehearsal and led a discussion with members in person to explore some of these issues. She used the information she had gathered, and examples from other similar groups, to put together a couple of options for how we could define our focus in future. We decided to focus on accessibility and being open to anyone who wants to play in an orchestra without the pressure of regular concerts. This has given us a clear way to describe who we are so that people know what to expect if they decide to come along to a rehearsal.  

Alongside these projects we have been working on making our communications more accessible, for example producing text-only online versions of programmes that can be translated into different languages or accessible to screen readers, making sure that the venues we use for rehearsals and concerts are accessible to everyone and taking part in the many excellent and thought-provoking webinars that Making Music has organised to talk about different aspects of accessibility. We are so grateful to have been selected for this pilot and the opportunity to work closely with the fabulous Making Music team. It has been transformational in so many ways and helped us to make sure that our music making is accessible to as many people as possible. 

Watch the two-minute video online here

Find out more about the innovative Men United in Song project, and a toolkit for a project-based recruitment model, in our resource

Find out more about the Great Bowden Recital Trust on their website

Follow the Great Bowden Recital Trust on Facebook / X (Twitter) / Instagram 

If you would like to know more about anything in this blog or you would like to tell us about your own inclusion work, please get in touch with Elizabeth Palmer, Inclusion Focus Programme Manager for the INCLUDE programme