We didn’t plan it this way – we had our meeting online today instead of being in Turin. Hope we’ll be back on the road soon. Until then, we are working steadily on compiling the toolkit and implementing the project.

In February 2021, with due caution in line with the epidemic situation, we held our first large-scale testing of the music exercises developed during the project. We made a video recording of the playful tasks and the moments of the testing, we hope to be able to make a few recordings public in along with the task descriptions. The session was led by Csaba Tőri, and the participants were open to amateur music making, working with young people.

In February 2020, in Budapest, with the ImPulzus Creative Music Lab of the Hangkeltő Foundation, we held several workshops for amateur choirs, in which the ImMusic project also played a prominent role. We have previously tested the exercises that we plan to include in the toolkit collection that we will publish at the end of the project. Our concept was to assess the extent to which the music exercises can be understood, the extent to which they can be involved in working with amateur choir singers without any previous music experience, and the extent to which the training and management of the tasks can be handed over. Based on the experiences of these workshops and the paricipants feedbacks, it can be seen which tasks prove to be difficult to be transferable in such a short period of time, and we will continue to work on them.

In October 2019 we spent a long weekend in Helsinki, this was the ImMusic team’s very first international project meeting. We were so excited about it, we were finally able to meet the partners we had previously contacted only via email.
The atmosphere was friendly from the very first moment. The president of the school, Pedro Aibeo, picked us up with his land rover at the bus stop in the typical Finnish landscape.
During the two-day professional work we got to know each other, the participating organizations and the project implementation schedule. Particular emphasis was placed on mapping the features of music programs to be developed that can be used in youth communities and on the division of tasks between the partner organizations.
We worked on setting dates for the next meetings and programs by scheduling the testing of the elaborated music sessions. It was also important to discuss the basics of budget and communication with our partners. During the two days we were able to accomplish the tasks we had undertaken, the evening walks, the common BBQ and the dinner and sauna in the old mill building made the meeting especially memorable.

During the first workshop after launching the ImMusic project, we only started to think at an experimental level about how the concept could work in an environment where the participants had not yet encountered the basics of music. Since this is a new field even for us, first of all, embedded in the course of the workshop, as a relaxing exercise, we selected tasks that could even be suitable for the final collection of the project. We tried simpler melodies, one-two-part African arrangements and rhythm exercises with the participants. Even during the first testing, we considered it important that the participants could also get involved in the creation of the exercises, that they could also initiate a rhythmic turn or melody, which the group would take over and pass on.