The Brighton Institute of Modern Music opened its doors last year on Francis Street becoming the fourth branch of the prestigious music college along with Brighton, Bristol and Manchester schools. Having already packed out their premises on Francis Street, they have now acquired a second building on the 115-117 Coombe in the old St. Brigid’s school.
Given this huge demand for places in their degree courses (which are accredited by DIT), BIMM has instigated a performance audition for prospective students looking meaning that all applications need to be in by February 1st with no opportunity for late application.
When Totally Dublin visited the new premises last week to have a nose around, we caught up with Cathy Davey one of many industry pros who form the teaching and tutorial staff at the college. Cathy teaches the songwriting students and told us a little bit about what prospective students can expect from studying at BIMM Dublin.
Can you explain a bit of what goes into teaching songwriting?
You don’t teach songwriting per se, but you have classes on the different aspects of songwriting, then altogether the picture will become clearer. I do songwriting techniques and pre-production. Songwriting techniques every week, so it could be three-chord tricks or it could be disjunctive and conjunctive melodies. It ranges from broader things down to the nitty-gritty and all we’re doing is doing practical tasks so that through practice you improve. So it’s not only teaching and lecturing, it’s about putting in the hours where you are putting in the practice in an environment where you get feedback. It’s not just seething at home and writing, which is a wonderful, but its also writing and having to expose yourself and feeling what you get from an audience that you trust aswell, because they’re your peers.
So that’s one part of it, and the other part of it is performance, where you bring in your song as a student and you perform it in class on your own and you get feedback on how everything thinks it is working and their ideas. And the next class is live performance workshop where you work with the house band and you direct them on how you want it, so it’s building up how you articulate with other musicians what’s inside your head, how to make it come to fruition, which is another problem that musicians have – they don’t speak the same language as other musicians, so this is about finding a common language. So those are just some of the things in the songwriting module that I know about.
I guess part of the idea of working with other people is to take the students out of their comfort zone.
Yes, to expose them to things that they’re not used to doing and things that they would not have experienced. Everyone will have their own way of writing and it probably doesn’t occur to them all the different ways that other people write and how they can incorporate that into the way that they write. Which is good when you have writers block, which is a big problem, but in actual fact, all you have to do is exercise the muscle so that when inspiration does take you, you’re not like a sitting duck waiting for it and then you’re cold. Instead you are all the time honing your skills like you would as a writer, like any craftsman would, you have to hone those skills, so that when you come up with something wonderful you have the language and the skills to portray it honestly and not in a clichéd way. That’s just the songwriting part of the college, there’s also degree course in bass, drums, guitar and so on.
And do they interact at any stage?
They do yeah. They’re all working on different projects and there’s also live performance for all of the students where the different musicians are working with the different songwriters. And that’s really important for the musicians to be working with original material so that there isn’t a clear plan, they’re having to create it out of thin air.
All applications for the BIMM Dublin BA (Hons) in Commercial Modern Music (DT506) must be made through the CAO before 1st February 2013 as this is a restricted course and therefore there is no late application or change of mind facility available. The college is also opening an open day this Saturday 26th January at the Francis Street campus.
