Last Monday 28^th and Tuesday 29^th August music students at Damascus were once again able to embark on our very successful annual Music Camp. The camp involved all students that learn brass, woodwind, percussion, and strings and those that are a part of the String Ensemble, Concert Band and Junior and Senior Singers, an approximate number of 45 students from years 7 – 12.

Our Music Camp is designed to give students the opportunity to enrich their musical learning by working with students who have similar interests and commitments, further building their confidence and self-esteem as well as building on their social and emotional learning (SEL) through the experience of making music as a group. Our school captain of 2022, Lewis Clark quite openly stated in his address to the school that the inaugural camp at which he participated was one of his most memorable experiences at Damascus.

Music camps allow us to have concentrated and uninterrupted time to work with each other in our respective ensembles. It was exciting to see young band players on instruments such as saxophone, clarinet and Euphonium become more and more confident as they played through charts such as Raiders March from the Indiana Jones movie. The string ensemble perfected works such as Don’t Stop Believin’ and A Thousand Years which became crowd pleasers at our Wednesday lunchtime concert. The singers embarked on Let it Grow as a combined piece as well as some African pieces and had previously worked on a jazz a capella number and a highlight piece from La La Land – Another Day of Sun. Of course all the hard work was also complimented with some fun activities like musical bingo in the evening, a little Karaoke, board games and some great chill out time over meals and breaks. The highlight for me is always watching students across year levels collaborate, problem solve and team build together to make music but more importantly to build friendships and networks within their music community at Damascus.

Students going on a camp to play their instruments and work in groups is by far the most advantageous opportunity to grow their skills not only in music but in their brain development to excel in all their other subjects. This is strongly backed by educational neuroscientific evidence and missing school to go on music camp is not going to disadvantage their learning at school but will only enhance it. It is timely that in The Age the following article was published just this weekend, showing the outcomes of a research study done in a Sydney public school that has just been completed. The study enabled all students to have 15 minutes of music tuition a day. The results are exciting and have been life changing for all of these students. The NSW government and Education Department are now considering how music learning becomes a daily part of each student’s learning at school as well as part of the National Curriculum.

St Marys North Public school transformed by music into ‘happiest place on Earth’ (theage.com.au)

All of the students involved in camp should be extremely proud of the way in which they worked so very hard and built such great camaraderie amongst themselves. Their intensive work will and has already shown positive results, many of which they would like to show you at our end of year concert coming up in November. We hope you will be able to come along and celebrate the joy of music and these student’s wonderful achievements.