Background
Jarvis Cocker accepted our invitation to help the children from two different continents to work together to make a piece of music. He had the idea of children playing together online. “Let’s bring in some technology and jam and just see what it sounds like”, he said. “We could call it a cyberjam’. His aim was to enable the children to explore playing for themselves and see what happened.
Brian Eno spent a day with us at his studio exploring a number of ideas. The best solution seemed to be to enable all centres to play together but to enable one centre to play abstract sounds (whirligigs, abstract vocal sounds), another to play percussion and a third to sing rhythmically without any expectation of the rhythms synchronising. We had no idea of the delays or whether it would work. Brian Eno’s assistant kindly agreed to come to the theatre on the day and to install some technology to enable the children to work with percussion.
We organised the concert to take place at Twentieth Century Theatre, London W8 on Wednesday July 6. We installed three separate broadband lines so that each centre’s sounds reach the theatre through a separate connection. BT arranged for the connection to be clear to guarantee good sound with minimum
Jarvis Cocker ran two workshops, one at Great Ormond Street and one at Sudbourne Primary School introducing the children to new music technology and possible percussive ideas.
delay.
We structured the concert only by organising a series of sounds we could introduce. We brought whirligigs for the children from the primary school, rehearsed the children from the South African hospice singing nursery rhymes in their own languages and Jarvis Cocker installed instruments at the hospital and fronted the jam on stage at Twentieth Century Theatre. Leo Abrahams sampled sounds from the primary school and the hospital and programmed the music so that the touch of a keyboard triggered the voices of the children. He went to Great Ormond Street to lead the concert there.
On the day of the final concert the connections worked patchily throughout the concert and unfortunately broke down during the cyberjam. However, when we finally gathered all the sounds to mix a final recording we were amazed to discover everyone was playing in the same key and the same tempo. It was a miracle! Leo Abrahams kindly offered to mix the final recording and that is we have uploaded below.
