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| The Sage Gateshead |
It’s a very unusual building, iconic. I think it looks like a shining, silver patchwork chrysalis for a gigantic caterpillar that’s resting along the quayside. The inside is just as marvelous. There’s no hint of a transforming butterfly–just massive, beautiful concert halls and exceptional views of the River Tyne, including the plethora of imposing yet graceful bridges that straddle the water, the nearly 900-year-old keep of Newcastle Castle, and all the amazing old buildings, spires, and clock towers that still make me marvel that I live in England. I felt a childlike excitement every time I beeped my way through the stage doors and into the front of house, always secretly expecting someone to stop me and ask what I was doing there.
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| Newcastle quayside |
The thing was, I knew, after fifteen years of teaching music, that I was done being a teacher. I had suspected that I needed a career change about eight years ago, but I persisted in music teaching because that’s what I had trained to do. Since I was a teenager I had wanted to teach music, and everything I did after high school prepared me to follow that path. So even though I knew, deep down, that I should find a job that aligned with my true self, where I wouldn’t have to put on an extroverted façade all day long, it felt too scary of a prospect to up and leave. That’s where In Harmony came in.
An In Harmony program assistant job opened up last summer, and given that the program runs at my daughter’s school, and I would be working close to our neighborhood, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for me. It was a purely administrative job, not a teaching one, and it was in the music education field, so I would still feel right at home. Or, mostly anyway, because music ed in England is not the same as in America. But we’ll come to that later.
I worked out of the two schools, doing mostly simple tasks like printing music and setting up chairs and music stands, and I could be as introverted as I wanted to be. There was very little stress involved, no work in the evenings, no sleepless nights agonizing over how to deal with difficult students. After two years of pandemic- and baby-induced stay-at-home momming, I was grateful to be out of the house and having conversations with adults again, even if the majority of my skills and training were not being put to use and most of my music teacher colleagues had no idea that I was actually one of them. It was a job and I was getting paid for easy work.
But this was my first foray into UK working life, and it was the first time since moving to Newcastle that I was surrounded by non-family British adults all day long. It was eye-opening. Although everyone was welcoming, more or less, I never quite got over my feeling of otherness. It was little things: having my colleagues offer me a cup of tea multiple times a day (nice, but strange), hearing different music terminology and pronunciations (see below), and not understanding 90% of the interactions I had with the school caretaker (US: janitor) due to his Geordie dialect.
On one memorable occasion, I was talking with my boss and some of my colleagues, and I learned what I thought was a new British term. New to me, anyway. They were describing someone and feigning surprise at the person’s actions. “Shakara!” my boss said. Shakara? What the heck does that mean? I thought. Perhaps it was a word with roots in one of Britain’s former colonies, like pukka, or pundit. I pondered it the rest of the day, and when Google didn’t help elucidate things for me, I asked Rory if he was familiar with the word. He was puzzled too. But later that evening we had a breakthrough. Turns out I hadn’t learned a quaint new English word. I simply couldn’t understand my boss’s accent. It wasn’t shakara, it was shock horror. Oops.
British music terminology also required a lot of learning. It was strange to be working in the same field as I’d always been, and yet to not know the right words for things. Take rhythms for example. In the US, rhythms are described using a logical fraction system. A long, four-beat note is a whole note. A shorter two-beat note is a half note. One beat is a quarter note, and so on. In Britain, logic is nowhere in sight. Rhythm terms are random, and admittedly, rather comical.
- Whole note = semibreve
- Half note = minim
- Quarter note = crotchet (how do people say that with a straight face?)
- Eighth note = quaver (also the name of a cheesy crisp)
- Sixteenth note = semiquaver
- 32nd note = demisemiquaver
- 64th note = hemidemisemiquaver (you’ve got to be kidding me)
You may be asking yourself by now, what happened to the job? Why did it end? Surely Talia couldn’t have been so incompetent at setting up chairs that she was fired? (Yes, thank you for the vote of confidence.) Well, as with most things in the arts sector, it came down to money, or a lack thereof. The Arts Council England, a government agency that provided two-thirds of In Harmony’s funding, suddenly pulled the plug this year. I guess they decided that ten years of changing kids’ lives with music was quite enough. They left us with one more year of funding as a transition year, but starting in August 2024, the Newcastle In Harmony program will be decimated. As the last one in, I was the first one to be let go. It’ll only go downhill from here.
I’ve seen first-hand the difference that In Harmony makes in the lives of the children and families who participate. It transforms communities, it brings people from wildly disparate backgrounds together in one common endeavor. It gives children with minimal hopes for the future the tools and attitudes they need to overcome the innumerable obstacles in their path.
And it’s going down the drain.
In Harmony Newcastle will still exist after 2024. At least, in some form. Maybe not in both schools, maybe not for all the children, but a shell of In Harmony will remain. Yet it will never have the same impact as it does now, which, frankly, pisses me off. All the more so because my two kids should have benefited from this program throughout their primary school years, and now that’s been snatched away from them. Through In Harmony, my daughter started learning the cello in school, twice a week, from age five. My three-year-old son is going to have musicianship classes in his nursery (US: preschool) this year, taught by an excellent, qualified music teacher. That’s freaking remarkable. How many schools do you know that provide that level of music education? I’m willing to bet the answer is none.
And given the government’s disregard for the value of arts education, I expect there soon won’t be any schools left in England embracing music on the same level as they currently do with In Harmony. For me, as someone who has dedicated my entire adult life to teaching music, this is heartbreaking. I was only with In Harmony for a year, and all I did was make copies and stack chairs, but it’s been hard to leave this program, hard to see its foundations crumbling, and hard to say goodbye to my first British job and colleagues, even if I didn’t always understand what they were saying.
But when one door closes, another door opens.
There is one upside to my newfound lack of employment. Thanks to the financial security provided by my wonderful husband, and the free preschool childcare provided by my kids’ school, I now have the time, freedom, and mental space to try full-time something I’ve always wanted to do: writing. The ultimate job for the introverted. You may be seeing more blog posts from me soon. Stay posted.
