We held an interactive singing program with ImPulzus on the second day of the first Őrség Contemporary Music Days, which was fortunately realized at the last minute after the closures due to the epidemic. The event, held in one of the most beautiful regions of Hungary, in a beautiful landscape, provided an extremely good opportunity to test those exercises in a completely unfamiliar environment, which even make it possible to learn contemporary pieces of music.

The pandemic affected people in many ways. At ImPulzus, we thought a lot about how to ease the confinement and move the sessions that gave the most to those around us to the online space. The most difficult thing was that we could solve the singing at the same time. Unfortunately, we can’t do miracles either, and we can’t fight the signal strength, but by switching the microphone on and off, we can moderate it a lot in order to offer an interesting and enjoyable program. The possibility of this is also given to youth workers, so the realization of music programs can be solved even in the online space. Most of the tasks we prepare can also be adapted online with a little creativity, and we provide ideas for this when developing them.

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.