YST Conservatory Orientation 2022: Reflection

What did you learn about yourself/music through orientation (bootcamp and creative project) at YST?

During the creative project preparation process, there were numerous ideas that we had to manage. Initially, I was looking forward to listening to the ideas of my batchmates and how we could all combine these ideas together. While this excitement lasted throughout the entire process, there were some times I felt a little bit helpless during the project whenever we didn’t seem to make effective progress during our rehearsals. While I tried to convey my suggestions to my batchmates, perhaps I wasn’t being explicit enough as to what I felt could be improved about the performance. In addition, while I did try to voice out my opinions, there were some occasions which I was somewhat afraid of giving out suggestions, perhaps because I wasn’t familiar enough with my batchmates and was unsure of how they would accept my views. However, in hindsight, I could have been more courageous in terms of speaking my mind and be less hesitant when giving suggestions, which could have improved the communication of our team as a whole.

Upon reflection of the way we worked through the creative project, I felt there could have been clearer communication as to what roles each of us played in the project. Perhaps, the role of a leader was not very clear and mostly assumed, which makes it hard for us to decide on which ideas to keep in the project as we did not know who we should be listening to. I feel that we could have better communicated as a team as to how we want to assign specific roles in the ensemble so that there would be a clearer sense of our team dynamics.

However, despite some hiccups in the way we worked as the team and how I approached the project, orientation was truly a wonderful experience for me. I am thankful for the opportunity to be surrounded by talented classmates and also interact with students from all walks of life, and I look forward to spending more time with all of them. In addition, now that we know more about each other’s preferences and tendencies, I believe it will be easier to work together with one another as we can better understanding each other’s working style.

The Creative Project will be presented as a family concert for children on October 1st. What changes would you make to the current Creative Project to reframe it as a family friendly concert for children aged 4-12?

1. Introduce a storyline or narrative to guide the children through the music, making the music more contextualised for them. We could assign specific motifs to specific ideas in the storyline, something like a leitmotif / Peter and the Wolf.

2. Include graphics through powerpoint

3. Include a spoken narration

4. Musically, some of the music could be played in smaller ensembles, allowing more variety in terms of the texture of the sound. The change in size of instrumentation could possibly influence the storyline as well.