…which was on all things music and belonging…but then I had one chest/shoulder pain too many that lunchtime and spent the rest of the day at Addenbrooke’s having various tests done before they gave me the all clear.
Updated to add: You can watch the video of Sonita Alleyne’s speech for the Kate Pretty Lecture 2023 here ( it lasts about half an hour, followed by a Q&A).
The last time I was in A&E I was in the major injuries/severe illnesses bit.
…so it was a bit of a relief to see the sign above – although inevitably and as with A&E units across the country, demand outstrips capacity and it wasn’t until the event at Homerton had ended that I was finally discharged.
“Discharged – with huge thanks to@EastEnglandAmb
& @CUH_NHS for looking after me this afternoon 🙂”
So if you were expecting a live-tweet-along from the speech by the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge – Sonita Alleyne, my apologies. I hope a video of her speech will be up – because the subject area matters. And not just to Cambridge.
“As the new Chair of the University’s Centre for Music Performance, Sonita Alleyne will consider how music performance connects with issues of wellbeing, inclusivity, and outreach, contributing to a sense of belonging, and creating the opportunity for connections between the University and the City. The talk will be followed by Q&A, and is free and open to the public.”
Homerton College – 6th Kate Pretty Lecture, 2023
Some of you will be aware that I was delighted at the prospect for a Centre of Excellence for Music Performance around the time it was launched in 2021 – when it also started seeking support for its work too.
“The Centre will also work with local schools in an outreach capacity, aiming to enrich the musical life of the University and the wider Cambridge community. It will strive to widen access to musical training for prospective students of all backgrounds, highlighting Cambridge as the first choice for aspiring musicians.”
Matilda Head in Varsity, 26 March 2021
One of the opportunities I was looking into (all things concert halls aside) was how such a new institution could join up an otherwise very fragmented music scene in Cambridge – one that I grew up in during the 1980s and 1990s. The positive memories are the ones from my primary school years. The negative ones generally are from my secondary school years – mainly due to opportunities that never were, and an exams-centric culture that drained much of the enjoyment music is meant to provide.
Lifelong learning in music
Several of you may recall I asked my local MP Daniel Zeichner to lobby ministers on my behalf about all things lifelong learning. You can read the response from the minister at the time here – Gillian Keegan – now Secretary of State for Education. I am hugely interested in lifelong learning policy because my chronic ill health means I can’t do the normal things that I used to take for granted in my 20s. Like working full time. Or travelling. Or following every week day at work with an evening class of one sort or another. Therefore alongside mental ill-health, all things heart-related, and CFS/ME is the inevitable feeling of loneliness and isolation – something that I ended up talking about with a couple of fellow patients in A&E about earlier on. Such is the persistence of loneliness in society it is now a public policy issue.
Therefore the topic of Sonita Alleyne’s Lecture – Building Belonging Through Music, was of huge interest to me and also to our city. Not only that – it was something I experienced positively as a young child in our primary school’s then new orchestra that its first concert at Homerton College in the very late 1980s. (It’s one of those simple melodies that stays in your head from primary school!) Then as an adult I experienced it pre-lockdown with the We Are Sound / Dowsing Sound Collective in performances at both the Cambridge Corn Exchange and Tattersalls in Newmarket (see the latter video here – I appear briefly about 24 seconds in!)
Group music lessons for adults
I’ve been lobbying the County Music Service to put these on for longer than I can remember, hence I was delighted to find out they’ve finally been able to secure the resources to do so in May 2023. Just gutted that being on the other side of town to their HQ I can’t really get there because public transport + CFS is not a good combination. Hence I put in a Q about one of the lifelong learning providers ‘south of the river’ offering something up – i.e. Hills Road’s Adult Education Service because amongst other things, it is close enough to the railway station and is also on bus links into and out of the city.
One thing that has been missing with Cambridge’s collective offer on lifelong learning is music for adults. Yet there are numerous examples elsewhere – the ones I’m most familiar with are in London such as the Mary Ward Centre, and the East London Late Starters’ Orchestra. My view for a long time has been that Cambridge and Cambridgeshire have enough interested adults willing to take up a new musical instrument (or re-start something they stopped playing in their teens) if there was affordable group tuition in a friendly and lively environment. While the Duxford Saturday Orchestra has that in spades (I went along for one term about a decade ago before my mental health crisis made travel by public transport amongst other things a pain), it’s one aimed at families where both parents and children make music together. There isn’t an option in/around Cambridge that is for adults only. Not that I’ve found anyway.
Bridging the gap between spectating and performing
While I’ve been to a fair few music performances and recitals in Cambridge over the decades, I struggle to recall any where I’ve felt a real connection not only to the music being played, but to the performers, the audiences, and the events. Having dwelt on it for more than long enough, much of it comes down to the structure of our city. Part of it is having grown up in a city where Cambridge University spaces were ‘no go’ areas (and the inertia that goes with that). Another part is that in our day-to-day lives, it’s all too easy for somewhere like Cambridge to relapse into that same old routine where town and gown share a city but live separate existences. A pattern repeated across so many different spheres, whether:
- the college landlord hiking up rents and pricing out a local independent trader out of business (see Galloway and Porter Bookshop)
- the University housing development getting out of requirements to provide social housing in a city with a massive housing crisis
- the consultancy report boasting the University’s impact on UK tourism revenues while the city council in the place that hosts it cannot afford to run its own permanent tourist information centre
I’m not pretending that overcoming the divides will suddenly have adult beginners playing grade-8-and-beyond-level pieces on the violin after a term’s worth of group lessons. What worked particularly well with the Duxford Workshop model was the fact that there were three slots throughout each Saturday morning and people could choose which one they wanted to go into except for the last one which brought everyone together irrespective of standard & instrument into a single large orchestra. And it worked. Taken to ‘the next level’ and you have professional musicians prominent in different genres running their own events – particularly in Folk Music such as the Unthanks and their singing holidays. One thing that really saddened me about my 1990s teenage years was that no one in school or education encouraged us to have anything to do with folk music despite the Folk Festival being in our neighbourhood every single summer. That for me was a massive collective failure of our city where the city failed an entire generation – my generation. It still makes me angry thinking about it.
This is why bringing so many people together amongst other things will raise the collective awareness of music making and music performance across our city. Given the increase in our population turnover, and also our population growth, I think there’s an even greater onus on institutions with influence and wealth to step up and support groups that deal with the negatives of the changes happening in and to our city. Credit to the volunteers and organisers of events such as this weekend’s Strawberry Fair whose musical and performing arts line up is one of the biggest I’ve seen in years, and to the Folk Festival which provide some of the essential opportunities for our younger musicians. At the Strawberry Fair in the mid-2010s I filmed a young guitarist called Ellie who was playing at the Strawberry Fair just as I was starting out making community videos. This year, less than a decade later that same Ellie – Ellie Dixon, is playing at Glastonbury.
“Our own big stage in Cambridge – A new concert hall?”
I first started thinking about a new concert hall for Cambridge when as part of We Are Sound / Dowsing Sound Collective all but sold-out the Cambridge Corn Exchange in our Christmas Cocktail Concert of December 2014. (See the video montage here – yes, that is 100 of us singing in Icelandic. Music Director Andrea Cockerton threw some quite challenging vocal pieces at us, but always commissioned professional musicians to support us, which is what differentiated those experiences from other music collectives for me!)
Where do you go from packing out the biggest indoor venue in your home town? The other thing to remember is that the Corn Exchange was designed and built both as a corn exchange and as an entertainment venue for rich and poor – as Mayor John Death (yes, really!) told us in 1875. As with many assembly halls of that era, the acoustics were not great. (They’re even worse in the guildhall’s large hall on the other side of the road – but we were lucky that the Father of Modern Cambridge, Charles Henry Cooper was even able to get us that building even though it opened after his death in 1862!) The Corn Exchange was formally converted into a concert hall in 1986 following the failures to get a new large concert hall built in the 1960s. Given Cambridge’s population growth since then, is it time for a new, larger venue?
“Not only is a larger concert hall necessary to cater to the expansion of Cambridge’s population, but it would also mutually benefit both the city and the University in the delivery of the creative arts.”
Delilah Knight, Varsity, 15 May 2022
Ms knight goes on:
“Most importantly, a larger concert hall available for use by both the University and the city would allow for more equitable access to music performance of all genres within Cambridge. While music within the University may be “thriving”, the city of Cambridge is made up of more than just its University.
“There is historical precedent for such a venture, too, with Sir William Ivor Jennings QC, former Vice Chancellor of the University, pledging that the University would cover 50% of funding of a new large hall for both the town and university to use back in 1962.“
Delilah Knight, Varsity, 15 May 2022
Ms Knight refers to this pledge I stumbled across in the Cambridgeshire Collection which I shared with her in the course of a Cambridge Hub student group project that she led and for which I was the community sponsor for.
Which is why I wanted to ask…
…if Sonita Alleyne and people attending the Kate Pretty Lecture at Homerton College earlier would be interested in leading / taking part in a new town/gown campaign to get a new concert hall built. Not just any old one, but one on a currently unused site opposite the home of Cambridge’s first woman councillor Florence Ada Keynes (who arrived in Cambridge as an early Newnham College student – and stayed. Also known as the mother of John Maynard Keynes who founded the Arts Theatre).
It’s Florence I’d like to see the venue named after – one that also celebrates the history of the women who made modern Cambridge in a large mural in a glorious entrance hall. It’s a hard ask trying to get such a grand project built – especially as it would be nice to get it completed in time for Florence’s mayoral centenary 1932-2032. But if we could get the foundation stone laid by that year that would be enough. For as another Cambridge town hero stated:
“All I want to do is to see the first brick built there. I shall know then that it’s going to be finished. Then I can have some peace and quiet.”
The man who said those words?
Alderman Kelsey Kerridge. You may have heard of a sports centre named after him.
Above – from the Cambridgeshire Collection in Cambridge Central Library
I wanted to have the same sentiment for myself about a new large concert hall for Cambridge, but today was a reminder that I not only do I need to remain vigilant on all things health, but that such things need a team of people with multiple talents to drive them to success. I’m not that person who can bring together such a team. I’m just gutted. that I missed an opportunity to make an appeal to a potentially interested audience.
So if anyone’s got any suggestions on where to go from here (or are willing & able to convene a meeting somwhere – mindful that a new concert hall has been in the minds of local councils since 2013 (See p11 here)), feel free to drop some positive suggestions in the comments box. Because I spent 6 hours today in A&E and am feeling a little downbeat.
Food for thought?
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The Cambridge Town Owl 