What began as a regional outreach program run by the Music in Communities Award winning Leichhardt Expresso Chorus has grown into a cultural highlight on the calendar of north-western NSW. This multi-arts festival, under the artistic direction of Michelle Leonard, has grassroots community music making at its heart. The Music in Communities Network is please to be able to offer you a glimpse into the heart of this wonderful festival as we "live blog" daily for the course of the festival from 23rd to 25th September.

How do you house, feed and care for 189 young people between the age of 8 and 18?

The best way is to stage your project in Nth West NSW which not only has big skies and beautiful landscape, inspiring indigenous art forms and fantastic natural wildlife but is peopled with extremely generous and talented people who have huge hearts and capacity to help.

The communities around Baradine, Coonamble and Gulargambone have been baking, organising bedding and shifts of people to cook BBQ’s, supervise children, cart gear, and prepare artwork and feasts a plenty for months in preparation for the Moorambilla Festival this weekend. Nea and Ronnie and their team are cooking up a variety of storms to feed the 300 or so artists involved and the Monterey Café in Coonamble is being transformed into a 30’s style tea shop complete with live Jazz band.

What began as a regional outreach program run by the Music in Communities Award winning Leichhardt Expresso Chorus has grown into a cultural highlight on the calendar of north-western NSW. This multi-arts festival, under the artistic direction of Michelle Leonard, has grassroots community music making at its heart. The Music in Communities Network is please to be able to offer you a glimpse into the heart of this wonderful festival as we "live blog" daily for the course of the festival from 23rd to 25th September.

We are getting excited as we approach the starting date of the Moorambilla Festival ready to take flight on Friday 22 September in Coonamble, Baradine and Gulargambone. Ensembles from Sydney and all over NSW are preparing, rehearsing, packing bags, organising costumes, putting the final touches to compositions, backdrops and artworks ready for the big day.

We had the first rehearsals with the fabulous SYO Flagship orchestra this weekend and they are going to blow the minds of the audiences they perform for along with the Moorambilla Voices ensemble who are primed for the challenge!  Other artistic partners: Sydney Brass, Taikoz and the Leichhardt Espresso Chorus, are packing their trucks and are ready to roll – destination Nth West NSW- for some inspiring music, great spectacles, wonderful food, warm welcomes and good fun!

The Moorambilla Festival runs from September 22nd to 25th 2011 - click here to download the full 2011 Program with a sneak peak of the beautifully colourful and stunning artwork celebrating all the good things of life – a true collaboration between the Ngemba Wailwan Artists and the young people of the region from Moorambilla Voices.

WORKSHOP PASSES AND TICKETS ARE SELLING FAST - Go to www.moorambilla.com and follow the links!

Vivienne Winther is Artistic Director of Music For Everyone, the ACTʼs community music organisation . In November 2005, Vivienne was named 'The Canberra Times Artist of the Year', for her uncompromising vision and achievement in gaining national and international recognition for opera in the ACT. Vivienne will be blogging for us in the run up to our Music in Communities day in Canberra.

Music For Everyone (MFE) is gearing up for our annual Open Day, packed full of short performances from all our programs and hands-on opportunities for the general public.

Within the next week or so, we hope to post info on our website about some “play-in” events we are planning for Open Day this year, that are open to the general public as well as our members.  These are based on activities we did in 2010 for Making Music Being Well Week, Drum Circle and Big Guitar Gig.

Drum Circles are well known and popular activities all around the world, and a great way for novice and more experienced drummers to get together and jam: you just need a lot of drums and willing hands!

But what is the Big Guitar Gig? Well, our terrific team of acoustic guitar tutors gets together and chooses a simple ensemble piece in 3 to 4 parts.  This is given out to all their MFE students and friends, and also posted on the MFE website.  Then anyone out there who wants to play in the Big Guitar Gig can download the music, see what part they can manage, register with MFE to participate, and hopefully do some practice on it for a couple of weeks leading up to the big day. You do need to be able to read music to join in, and we do ask young guitar players to show the music to their teacher to get advice!

Vivienne Winther is Artistic Director of Music For Everyone, the ACTʼs community music organisation . In November 2005, Vivienne was named 'The Canberra Times Artist of the Year', for her uncompromising vision and achievement in gaining national and international recognition for opera in the ACT. Vivienne will be blogging for us in the run up to our Music in Communities day in Canberra.

If it’s August then September is not far off and that means coming up there’s the Music in Communities Network Meeting right here at the Ainslie Arts Centre in Canberra, followed the very next weekend by the Bloom Music Festival at the same wonderful location.

I hope everyone knows about the Music in Communities Network Meeting on 10 September and how much we Canberra music-makers are looking forward to getting together with like-minded people from around Australia.

But what’s the Bloom Music Festival?  It’s three day celebration of community music-making in the Ainslie Arts Centre, the hub for music in the ACT.

Vivienne Winther is Artistic Director of Music For Everyone, the ACTʼs community music organisation . In November 2005, Vivienne was named 'The Canberra Times Artist of the Year', for her uncompromising vision and achievement in gaining national and international recognition for opera in the ACT. Vivienne will be blogging for us in the run up to our Music in Communities day in Canberra.

Learning an instrument: Group tuition or individual lessons? Or maybe a bit of both?

A new term has started this week at Music For Everyone and we welcome back all our regular weekly participants to a flurry of activity. A couple of new beginner tuition groups have started up, as by mid-year the waiting list for beginners has grown enough to support extra groups.

Offering group tuition on all the instruments we teach, as an addition and alternative to the traditional individual one on one music lesson, has been a priority at Music For Everyone for several years now. Group tuition has its advantages and disadvantages. We feel the increased financial affordability of group tuition plus the enjoyable social aspect of learning music with others are two big factors in its favour.

Vivienne Winther is Artistic Director of Music For Everyone, the ACTʼs community music organisation . In November 2005, Vivienne was named 'The Canberra Times Artist of the Year', for her uncompromising vision and achievement in gaining national and international recognition for opera in the ACT. Vivienne will be blogging for us in the run up to our Music in Communities day in Canberra.

The break between Terms 2 and 3 is meant to be pretty quiet here at Music For Everyone (MFE). The only activity on the program is Music Jam, our annual get-together for all the participants in our weekly program of music for people with disabilities, more on that later.

But quiet doesn’t seem to be an optional setting for MFE or the Ainslie Arts Centre, Canberra’s dedicated community music space. We spent the first week of the ACT school holidays recovering from two major MFE events at the end of Term 2 and re-enrolling over 700 people for our Term 3 activities, with the lovely background hum of 50 or so children enrolled in the Young Music Society’s Winter Wonderland music camp. 

Michelle Leonard, is the founding Artistic Director and conductor of the Leichhardt Espresso Chorus, the Moorambilla Voices Regional Children’s Choirs and Festival Director of the Moorambilla Festival. This is the fourth and final instalment of her blog!

Well it has been an AGE since i have written - please accept my apologies - but I have done a festival program, two major concerts and a tour since!

Since I last was online I have seen over 1900 children in workshops for Moorambilla Voices, Some of the funniest moments this year happened either on the road or in the schools (a very large black snake insisting on getting in to sing was one of them in Coolah!). This was such a wonderful way to reinforce the capacity of teachers to effect real change in the lives of students. Schools were so very happy to have us this year, and the standard of concentration in workshops, and calibre of singing has never been stronger. I was in tears on more than one occasion looking back at how far we have come in just 6 years! So many, many communities are now looking upon music in the classroom and in the wider community as something that "we need to get back". This is again a huge change in attitude from 6 years ago. I feel a great deal of credit for has to go to the continual positive campaign run by the music in communities network... if you were ever doubting it - ITS WORKING!

Michelle Leonard, is the founding Artistic Director and conductor of the Leichhardt Espresso Chorus, the Moorambilla Voices Regional Children’s Choirs and Festival Director of the Moorambilla Festival. This is the third installment of her blog!

Since i last wrote the stars seem to have aligned! The festival postcard looks great. The LEC rehearsals are going VERY well. Concert program is at the printers. Orchestra manouvers (often in the dark) accounted for. Music is in Australia and being copied and sent to those who have requested it. Post-concert catering in hand. And finally, Moorambilla festival presenters locked-in with flyer well on the way to meeting deadline. PHEW!

Now all I need to do is look at my own scores, stay calm and happy in rehearsals, and focus on the reason we are all doing this - THE MUSIC!

Believe it or not the wheels are already in motion for the next LEC concert Sonnets and Sax (25th, 26th June). As I will be giving birth the weekend of this one, Dan Walker will conduct it (I cannot multitask that well!).

Michelle Leonard, is the founding Artistic Director and conductor of the Leichhardt Espresso Chorus, the Moorambilla Voices Regional Children’s Choirs and Festival Director of the Moorambilla Festival. This is the second installment of our first blog!

Well its been a busy week that is for sure!

Moorambilla just took over this week (not according to schedule damn it!) and some wonderfully exciting developments happened with the Weilwan Ngemba artists, from Warren through Outback arts, who will be  involved in 2011. Looks like their remarkable work will not only form the artistic starting point for the MAXed OUT commission this year, but we will meet up on audition tour to see them first hand, and talk about how we can show their work to best effect in the Art Deco Montery Cafe in Coonamble during the festival - exciting, challenging, an amazing opportunity and a real positive step foward. But HEAPS to do to bring it to fruition (again!).

Well its Sunday late afternoon - the kids are out playing soccer with Luke and i am going to use this 45 minutes to write my first ever blog!!!

... well in LEC land we have agreed at the Thursday committee meeting last week to pay a project manager for our concerts (on a case by case basis) after 12 years. In the last 5 years at least the role has got really huge, and we are now in the position where we have the skills, the processes and paperwork from previous events to make it smoother and more accountable. And finally (most importantly) we some money in the bank to do this. This has been a GREAT leap forward. The money of course is still an honorarium in reality, but  it is a recognition of the huge time and effort required to keep things looking like the proverbial swan (elegant on the top, paddling furiously underneath!). It certainly allows other committee members to focus on what they do best, support that person without drowning or leaving themselves, and thus the organisation continues to grow and prosper ...well thats the idea anyway. Will let you know how it goes!

By Amanda Jackes. Published in Music Forum magazine, Vol 18 Issue 3 (May 2012)

See also www.woodfordfolkfestival.com

The Woodford Folk Festival is a six day annual gathering that is the sum of all its people, past and present. For six days, the festival is a temporary community of people from diverse backgrounds who have made the pilgrimage for a myriad of reasons. From the music aficionado to the youth undergoing a rite of passage, from the avid music student to the spiritual explorer, from the circus-obsessed child to the environmental activist, the budding visual artist or the just plain curious, at Woodford people step out of their everyday world and become part of a shared experience.