InsideOut Musician: meet the team

It is 1993. Two lifelong girlfriends stand atop a Himalayan mountain doing a yogic forward bend. The sun arcs over the snowy peaks as they release their spines on a deep, clean exhale. Later, as they trek on, they might improvise over a local folk song, or listen to the musings of their young guide: ‘Must have empty box. Mind must be empty box.’ They are celebrating a pause in their life journeys - one having left her professional string quartet in Toronto and the other having completed her Masters’ degree in New York. Little do they know that, in this moment, in this break from the fast-paced world, seeds are being planted - composition, yoga, breath-work, folk music, mindfulness and improvisation - that will blossom into a sense of well-being throughout their lives as professional musicians. 

Fast forward almost three decades. A pandemic rages. The concert halls, pubs, theatres and colleges are empty, and the music has stopped. A global pause button has been pressed in the life journeys of all musicians. Not just pit players, not just students, not just rappers or folkies, but all musicians. Many are so heartbroken they cannot even listen to music without weeping and they sit alone in the silence, watching the callouses on their usually hard-working fingers soften into mush. Grief and fear are everywhere.

The two friends are now five - Sophie Renshaw, Lucy Russell, Liz Dilnot Johnson, Mairi Campbell, and myself, Ruth Phillips - and in March 2020 we knew we needed to step up. Our slow-cooking idea to develop a platform offering an organic approach to music learning became an urgent call to be of service at a catastrophic time, and thus InsideOut Musician was born.

What the future of music holds we do not yet know but we believe that, if we are to navigate it skillfully, we need to rediscover the things that are sorely missing - connection, inclusion, courage, equality and community. The enforced isolation of Covid-19 is devastating, but it is also offering us all a space, an opportunity to stop the race, abandon the competition, detach from the stress. We are being invited, however agonisingly, to slow down and heal our bodies, to quieten our minds, connect to our hearts and awaken our spirits. It is perhaps the first and greatest opportunity many of us will have in our lifetimes to go inwards like this and listen. What we hear may surprise us, and how we want to express it even more so. To go forward boldly and healthily in this new landscape we will need many more skills than those we have acquired at music college, and now we have the opportunity to develop them. With all the suffering musicians are experiencing, however - lack of motivation and hope, loneliness and depression -  the question many are asking is: How?

Many of the tools each of us offer on IOM were acquired in our own lives in response to personal suffering, whether in the form of a sense of inadequacy, frustration, disconnection, disembodiment or injury. Now, at a time of collective suffering, we are asking ourselves: What part can we play in helping transform global grief and loss into wisdom and creativity? In this series of monthly articles on musicians’ well-being, we will unpack our toolkits for you and reflect on what inspires and liberates us. Each of us has a different relationship to wellbeing and we will be presenting thoughts, meditations, exercises and challenges in the hope of supporting you as you navigate your way through this exceptional moment in time. Perhaps, like the yin within the yang, we can discover together that the words ‘lock down’ can also contain the seed of their opposite – ‘open up’.

Meanwhile, before we set off, a few words about the team who will be contributing to the series. We look forward to seeing you along the way.

Liz

As a composer and ‘co-muser’, Liz has seen that improvisation can promote a profound sense of wellbeing through confidence building, risk-taking and playfulness, and can be particularly empowering for those who, like her, were ‘trained’ to feel inadequate. She facilitates musicking with beginners, through amateurs to top professionals, delighting in bearing witness to their ability, through improvisation, to tap quickly into the deep well of their musicality.

Liz’s own sense of freedom began in her mid-30s when she engaged with non-Western musical traditions and non-notated forms such as gamelan, samba, Indian music, gospel and free improvisation. As she experienced this music, a new space opened up in which she could trust her listening and allow her natural instincts to be her guide. She has learned that, by using notation as our springboard, not our master, we can create and shape sound in increasingly playful, thoughtful and imaginative ways.

Liz’s music is featured on BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM and performed all over the world, her compositions often engaging with difficult subjects such as mental and physical health, the plight of refugees, Black Lives Matter and the environment. On InsideOut Musician she currently runs Taking The Plunge, Ways Into Improvising, Create, Co-muse, Compose and Basic Intro To Audacity.

Mairi

Having made the journey from a classical training at the Guildhall School of Music to a career as a folk artist, composer, theatre maker, story-teller, online ceilidh host and Interplay workshop leader, Mairi is passionate about finding the universal in the personal, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. Deeply rooted in her native Scotland, her powerful work flows often from her own story, from a sense of ‘digging where she stands’. Mairi believes that real transformation will be possible not through governments and institutions but person to person through human interaction and community. This, in turn, will bring about well-being.

Mairi is the recipient of six national music awards including the Inspiration Award in 2018. In 2019 she was inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame. Her first two solo shows Pulse (2016) and Auld Lang Syne (2018) have gained much critical acclaim and toured widely. The third part of her solo trilogy is due in 2021. On InsideOut Musician she currently runs Voice and Interplay, Slow Session, Fiddle Class and The Ceilidh.

Sophie 

As a young musician Sophie was drawn to improvising on the piano and dancing to music with abandon. Teenage inhibitions shut all that down until, decades later, she co-founded the ensemble ‘Blue Rider’. The group commissioned new work which encouraged them to leave the written page, incorporating free extemporisation, drama and the spoken word, and even inviting unsuspecting audience members to become part of the piece.

Sophie’s own sense of wellbeing comes down to how ‘at home’ she feels in her body and mind, and the tools that have helped her to find this are Alexander Technique, Yoga, meditation, dance and movement. She is committed to looking beyond the restraints of her classical training towards new musical forms and discovering the potential that lies in the imagination. Her voyage is an open ended one that could see her using arts practice in therapeutic contexts. Wherever it goes and whatever form it takes, Sophie knows it will always be about connecting to herself and the world from the inside–out.

Sophie is a member of The London Mozart Players and professor of viola and chamber music at the Royal Conservatoire Scotland. She is the violist in Trio Mythos and violist and arranger in the crossover collaboration Hirondelle. On InsideOut Musician she currently runs The Paradox Of Practice, Get Stylish! And Opening The Door To Harmonic Awareness

Lucy

Lucy’s search for wellbeing started (and indeed continues) with herself as the student. She believes that in order to understand how to connect in a meaningful way with another person - whether that be an audience member, colleague or student - we must first deepen our own awareness. As a yoga and mindfulness practitioner, she is particularly interested in the roles of empathy and compassion, committed to recognising, allowing, investigating and nurturing what is present both mentally and physically in herself and others. This ability to listen deeply within and without is, she believes, a crucial part of the musicians’ mysterious journey - with all its ups and downs, twists and turns - and possibly the one that contributes most towards our wellbeing.

Lucy is the first violinist of the Fitzwilliam Quartet and is a member of Trio Mythos and the crossover collaboration Hirondelle. Her solo recording of Bach’s Obbligato sonatas for violin and harpsichord (with John Butt) received a five-star review from BBC Music magazine: 'For sheer freshness, insight and life-enhancing joy, this newcomer goes to the top of the class alongside Podger and Pinnock, Manze and Egarr'. Lucy joins Ruth over the next two years on the mindfulness teacher training with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. On InsideOut Musician she currently runs Struggle Free Zone, Stylus Fantasticus, Storytelling With The Bow and Be Hip.

She says: 'I aspire to bring joy, reflection and imagination to performance, encouraging and facilitating others to find their own ways to "lift the dots from the page" and guide them towards greater communication through the language of music.'

Ruth

To Ruth, wellbeing involves being present, fully embodied and at ease. In her work as a cellist and performance coach she is committed to enabling these qualities in musicians so they can communicate authentically with grace, generosity and joy.

Unfortunately, her own musical education did not support such learning. As a young musician, she was taught to play with her head and her fingers and not much in between. She has a memory of her mother standing behind her while she practiced, moving her like a puppet. She has memories of being told endlessly that she was ‘talented’ but that her brother was a genius, of heavy legs and a heavier heart, of only being permitted to play slow movements in public, and of dread. It was only when she found herself in a hatha yoga class that she first glimpsed the possibility of freedom through breath and somatic awareness. Now, after three decades of yoga, African drumming, Five Rhythms dance, meditation, Voice Movement Therapy, Indian music, Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, Non-Violent Communication, Body Mapping, bouncing balls and a lot of gazing at ocean waves, she knows of nothing she enjoys more than playing music for other people, whether in their kitchen, in a wood or on an International stage.

Ruth was a member of Glyndebourne and Garsington Opera Orchestras and Opera Fuoco for many decades and is a member of Trio Mythos and the crossover collaboration Hirondelle. She is founder of The Breathing Bow and is about to embark on a two-year mindfulness teacher training with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. On InsideOut Musician she currently runs The Zen Practice Room, Let Bach Live, Limber Up! and Bow Pranayama.

'By cultivating a body that is grounded,' she says, 'breathing freely and primed for optimum movement, and a still mind able to listen and respond, “performance” can become the simple act of sharing the music we love with others.'

For more information on InsideOut Musician, click here.

To sign up for tomorrow's ceilidh, click here.