Planning a Tedx event, a music teacher's diary part four

Kiss the sky to link across the world

x=independently organised TED event.
How did my involvement in a Tedx event start?
How did I structure my first ideas?
How much of those first ideas will see the light of Tedx day?
Read on......

October 2012: Kiss the Comenius Sky

Half term and a short trip home. Searching through all those discs of concerts, music exchanges and workshops from more than 20 years of intercultural educational work in Madrid.  I watched the dvd of the final product of a 2007 Comenius Project    Music is our language   which brought together my students from Madrid with their contemporaries in Reykjavík, Iceland and Tower Hamlets in London. A moving final concert at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London takes the theme of Kiss the Sky. Children from local primary schools and the Comenius groups perform an extended piece in differentiated sections with Jimi Henrix’s rock guitar music as the central theme directed by Sigrun Saevarsdottir-Griffiths and Paul Griffiths.

An extended piece with a common thread is a great way to structure a large scale piece for Tedx. But what can we use as the central theme? 

October 2012: You in London & us in Madrid

In 2004 Sean Gregory, Director then of  Connect  at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, accepted an invitation to come to Madrid to lead a project combining creativity, communication and technology, three great themes of our age. With the help of my school’s IT team we set up a live video link to create and perform a musical improvisation piece involving students in Madrid and students with Rob Thomas at the University of East  London at the same time thanks to a live video link. 

Watching it again I am struck by the sense of wonder and sheer joy we all experienced as we enjoyed, as performers or as audience, the sight and sound of young people making music together in spite of being more than 1,000 kilometres  apart. In 2004 the technology was expensive and clunky: in 2013 we can almost do this via a couple of iphones. Who can we link up with to do a live improvisation via video link at Tedx?   

I start to contact colleagues in Italy, China, Prague, Australia and UK. 

Who will accept the invitation? 

How will we manage a long distance link up?

How will we cope with 8 hour or more time differences?

I edited this post on 6Jan2013