Pupils taking part in the Ballymun Music Programme are reaping the benefits learning to play music can bring, writes SHEILA WAYMAN
IN THE wintry dawn light, few people are out on the pavements of Ballymun town centre, but music-making is in full swing at each end of St Joseph’s senior national school, off the main street.
A dozen girls and boys of the senior wind group are playing their flutes, trombones and trumpets together in the specially built Music Room, under the attentive ear and rhythmic hand of jazz musician Ciaran Wilde.
In a classroom at the far end of the corridor, more than 20 young violinists, dressed in the school uniform of navy blue tracksuits with red piping, are getting into festive mood with a rendition of Silent Night.
By the time their peers across the country will be trooping into classrooms, these young musicians will have done at least half an hour of playing, packed their instruments away into padded cases and tucked into the breakfast provided.
“It’s a great time of the day to be working with the kids,” enthuses Ron Cooney, the inspirational driving force behind the highly successful programme, incorporating five primary schools and one secondary college in the area.
Playing music has become the norm for these schoolchildren. Between first and fourth class, every pupil in the St Joseph’s junior and senior national schools learns the recorder and then they are given the opportunity to graduate to another instrument. At least half of them do - all for free.
“Music Helps Us Grow” proclaims the notice on the corridor wall of the senior school, above a display of photos of pupils playing instruments. There are also pictures of a beaming Archbishop Desmond Tutu with the then president Mary McAleese, who were both there to open the Music Room in February 2009.
“It is not just about learning notes, it is developing all sorts of skills,” says the school’s principal, Maura Doyle. “It unlocks something in the child. It is not a chore but something they enjoy.”
According to Cooney, “Music is not a middle-class affectation, it is a central human activity, with a richness to it that goes beyond two and two is four.”
But as well as taking these children on a personal journey through music, he loves to bring them out of Ballymun to play gigs inside such revered buildings as Trinity College, Dublin Castle, the National Concert Hall and the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. A couple of them have scholarships to attend the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM) on Westland Row.
“Most citizens of Dublin walk by these institutions and don’t get in,” he points out. For these children to be centre stage and applauded in such venues helps them to feel valued and gives them a sense of belonging in the city.
“If a child leaves school at 12 with some of that, I think we’re halfway there.” He is frustrated by the inevitable drifting away of some very promising musicians as “life” crowds in when they become teenagers, but he is proud that music is now a Leaving Certificate subject at the local Trinity Comprehensive School.
Not only does Cooney want music to change the way the children of Ballymun see themselves, but he is determined that their music will reshape other people’s views of Ballymun. He is delighted, for instance, that by being an exam centre for the RIAM, the school’s Music Room will be drawing children in from all over north Leinster “for their moment of excellence”.
“Their parents will have to drive to Ballymun, for the first time probably, and find the place called the Music Room – it will be one of the nicest places they will have ever played. Then they will go home and they will have been to Ballymun.”
Another step on that journey of changing perspectives will come when the young singers and orchestral players appear on the big screen in a film documentary that opens in Dublin cinemas this week.
Ballymun Lullaby, directed by Frank Berry, follows Ron Cooney and the making of a CD of music, specially composed by Daragh O’Toole for, and performed by, the children – along with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.
Six months after the launch of the Ballymun Lullaby CD at the end of 2009, Cooney said he felt “the world at large has yet to hear this music”. The film, which has been doing the festival circuit before its cinema opening, should certainly help to bring it to new ears.
Full of good humour and youthful exuberance, it tells an uplifting story of how music has heralded the dawning of new optimism as a suburb re-emerged from the rubble of the Republic’s one and only high-rise housing estate.
What was described in the 1960s as a “bold, daring attempt to solve a desperate problem” – a chronic shortage of housing – soon became synonymous with poverty and crime. Families were marginalised; there was nowhere for the children to play and no shops.
Six of the seven high-rise towers have been demolished since 2004 in the regeneration of Ballymun, with residents rehoused and a town centre created. The music programme is one of the much-needed social initiatives amid the physical transformation of the environment.
As Fr Peter McVerry says in Ballymun Lullaby: “Problems don’t go away when you move from a flat to a house.” However, while some anti-social behaviour persists, it is no longer allowed to define the community.
Cooney, who lives in Glasnevin and had no connection with Ballymun, started coming to St Joseph’s junior school to teach recorder in 1996, as part of a Department of Education arts initiative. “A recorder class, unless you have it well marshalled, is a beast not to be trifled with,” he laughs over a cup of tea in the staff room of the senior school, after the teachers have filed out to their classrooms.
When they began to form music ensembles for a three-year pilot project in 2001, it was a “jaw-dropping moment” for teachers in the school, he says, when they saw how easily children transferred to new instruments after several years of playing the recorder.
Their first gig as a band was Nine Lessons and Carols in the neighbouring St Joseph’s Church – with a bouncer on the door.
“The parents and grandparents turned up and there was a huge emotional response. The parents had never heard the kids practising at home,” says Cooney.
“I remember we did In the Bleak Midwinter and the place was just silent at the end of it. It was one of the deepest experiences that I’ve had.” It brought home to him that no matter how difficult a situation parents find themselves in, “it is very rare a parent doesn’t want the best for their kids”.
When we finish talking, Cooney is off on his motorbike to his main job as a music teacher at Alexandra College in Milltown – a very different kind of school in a very different part of the city. “Some people say these kids are living on the margin and they would describe the other kids as living in a bubble,” he comments. “Both of them need to branch out.”
By combining singers and orchestral players from both schools for various ventures, including the recording of Ballymun Lullaby, Cooney has helped them to do just that.
When the two junior schools get together there is “no ostensible ‘they are different to us’,” he adds. “They are all playing music together.
Ballymun Lullaby opens in the Irish Film Institute and Cineworld, Parnell Square on Friday
MUSICAL YOUTH: ‘IT’S A GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR ANY CHILD’
Sean Tuke (11) plays with the St Joseph’s string group four days a week – twice before school and twice afterwards.
He chose the violin, he says, because his sister Shannon (18) played it and liked it. She bought her first violin with her Communion money and it is this three-quarter-size instrument he is playing now.
Their mother, Rachel Tuke Lee, says she can’t stress enough what St Joseph’s gives children through the music programme.
“It is a great opportunity for any child – no matter where you are from or where you live.”
You see the difference when they go on to secondary school, she says.
It made Shannon, who had the chance of playing in the National Concert Hall among other places, much more confident and she did well in her Leaving Certificate, she adds, because of the music.
HIGH NOTE: ‘MUSIC BOOSTS MY SELF-ESTEEM’
When it came to choosing an instrument to play at the age of eight after learning the recorder, Tara O’Brien picked the flute “because it was shiny. I liked how it looked.”
On such whims are life-defining decisions made. Nine years later, she is preparing for her grade VII flute exam and aiming to study music full-time at college after her Leaving Cert next June.
“Everything I do revolves around music,” says Tara, who is one of the individual success stories of the Ballymun Music Programme. At the age of 10, she won a scholarship to DIT’s Music Conservatory where she attends three times a week.
How much practice does she have to do each day? “I don’t call it practice – I want to play,” she says firmly, before estimating that she squeezes in about hour to an hour and a half daily, around her time at Trinity Comprehensive School in Ballymun, homework and other musical commitments. She taught herself the piano and recently passed grade IV in that.
Her talent and dedication are evident in the film documentary Ballymun Lullaby, in which she features prominently, along with Darren Scully, who collaborated on the lyrics of the choral music, and solo singer Wayne Beatty.
“Music gives me confidence and boosts my self-esteem,” says Tara, who thinks she probably appreciates the chance to learn music and the doors it is opening for her better than more privileged youngsters might. “I have to work harder for it.”
Her mother, Lucy, knew nothing about classical music when she was growing up in nearby Finglas. “It was never played in our house, I never understood it.”
But after years of supporting her youngest child’s burgeoning music career, the mother of four says now she can appreciate it and enjoys picking out the different instruments when she and Tara are listening to orchestral music.
Before they got a car three years ago, Lucy and Tara had to allow two hours to make the bus journey from Ballymun to the Music Conservatory in Rathmines. On one occasion, Lucy recalls they got so soaked waiting at a bus stop, she had to call the music teacher to say Tara would miss her lesson because they had to go back home to get out of their wet clothes.
Tara’s ambition is to complete the Bachelor of Music in Education degree course and go full circle by returning to the schools here to inspire a new crop of Ballymun music makers.
“For her to come back here would be great,” says her mentor Ron Cooney, without wanting to put pressure on her. “I think we will see the real fruits of this in a generation.”
