Making Music in a Muslim High School

It’s working! After two years of developing a Nasheed Curriculum in a school that used to consider background music on a documentary as ‘collateral damage’, I have been invited, on their recommendation, into a second Islamic High School to look into developing something similar.

In the first year, we tiptoed gently - delivering a curriculum almost entirely around Nasheeds (religious songs), and without any use of instruments, recorded or live; with the exception of a Duff, an untuned drum for accompanying song. This meant that we had to be very careful about which Nasheeds we used and then how we used them to deliver the various aspects of the music curriculum, which, were required of a government funded school.

Nevertheless a team of three musicians went in every two weeks to deliver a curriculum of singing and performing, theory and notation and composition. We began by building a repertoire of Nasheeds and enjoying group singing and harmonies:

• Peace Train by Yusuf Islam
• Qasidah Burdah

Towards the end, pupils were writing and performing their own Nasheeds around topics such as Ramadan and their identity as being Muslim teenagers, mostly born in Britain.

My part was exploring Ramadan Nasheeds so we did this by listening to a few:

• Welcome O Ramdan
• You Came to me (Ramadan Song) English by Sami Yusuf
• Ramadan El Sana Di / Ramadan This Year

For the purposes of this discussion it was ok to use these tracks but we didn’t linger on the fact that there was instrumental accompaniment for two of them. This in itself was fairly ground breaking and only possible after two terms of building positive relationships so that we were trusted not to be subversive. Mostly we used the first Nasheed, which was unaccompanied, and the pupils really enjoyed singing that as part of the process.

From there we were able to appraise the Nasheeds and explore the purposes, audience and content of these before exploring how to go about writing our own. At the same time I introduced the musical concept of ostinato; a simple way of building texture in song through repeating musical patterns; and we used that as the main building block for composing the Nasheeds.

I have some recordings of what grew out of the process – and am really quite proud of them given the space of time we had to develop and perform them. I just need to check if it is ok for me to put them on the blog – so fingers crossed I’ll put them up later.

Over all this was a hugely successful year – building a culture of singing and an acceptance of the need for a music curriculum. Its main limitation was that the work had been almost entirely delivered by a team of external musicians, making the work unsustainable long term. Therefore, I was absolutely delighted and honoured, when I was invited to return the following year to work alongside one of the teachers to build a curriculum, which, she would eventually be confident to deliver with my initial support.