One of the Island's leading Manx music specialists is celebrating a major milestone today.
Dr Chloe Woolley has been working with Culture Vannin for 20 years!
She spoke to our Howard Caine.
Manx Newscast
Manx Newscast: Dr Chloe Woolley marks 20 years at Culture Vannin
I'm Chloe Woolly, Manks Music Development Officer at the Culture Van. And we're here not specifically for anything you're doing, so much as to celebrate something of an anniversary. Yes, 20 years today, 15th of November 2004, I started my post at, well, what was the Manks Heritage Foundation and now Culture Van? How did you first get into it? Well, I was at Henry University, I'd just finished my PhD. My PhD title was The Revival of Manks Traditional Music from the 1970s to the present day, and this post was advertised by the Manks Heritage Foundation for one year position as Manks Music Specialist. And this was Charles Garde and members of the Centre for Manks Studies, Dr. Finale Bayes and Dr. Borisha Madrell, they recognised the need for some input into the schools where Manks Music would be encouraged and they needed someone to do it, so I was very, very lucky that I got the post and I moved back to the Isle of Man in 2004. Had you always imagined you'd come back and work here? I had, yes, yeah, particularly in the latter years of my PhD, obviously my research was all based here, so I'd come back and I interviewed about 30 people, they'd interviewed about their involvement in Manks Music and Dance and the language and the political side of things in the 1970s and found it very, very interesting, and I think because I was involved in the Scottish folk scene, my husband Malcolm Stitt, he was a professional Scottish musician, played guitar and bazooki with bands such as Boyzalock and Def Shepherd, and he, or that whole community, I could see how it was flourishing over there and a lot of people worked in education in Scotland through the facial movement and in the local schools, so I thought I could apply some of that knowledge back home, and then this position came up, which was just perfect. And then what, because people will know your name and people know Culture of Man, but what do you actually do on a day-to-day basis, any people say, "Well yes, I know Chloe, well these works are Culture of Man," and what would you say, is it such a thing as an average day for you or not? Not really, no, it's a huge variety of different things. Because of the school stuff, I still work with education, so my colleague Joe Colister, who's an advisor, who teaches for the Department of Education, we do a lot of work together, we do workshops throughout the year, depending on calendar customs we go in, teach songs, verses, little bit about the folklore, but we also organise the Manx folk awards together, and that carried on from the critic to egg, competitions that Fiona McCarty used to organise. Now it's the Manx folk awards, and that takes place just before Easter every year, and involves hundreds of children. So we organise that, I work with the music service, over the years we've produced several resources that encourage instrumentalists to use Manx music in the first few grades. So Dr Laura Roles worked with us to produce a fiddle book, so you can do that up to grade 5, they're all graded to represent Manx music but against the associated board exams. I've also produced books for the float, the brass instruments, and when John Kinley was in the music service, we developed a whole scheme to teach whistle to whole classes, and that's been going for about 10 years, and I think most of the schools now have had this intensive Penny Whistle course. I think I've had a comment there. Oh, did you? Yes, yes. So we've done that, we've delivered that to adults as well. So we also work with adults, very recently we had some workshops from visiting musicians, one-jappy, and Joy Dunlop from Scotland, so we worked on learning tunes but also skills, traditional music skills. Ron Jappy did a guitar workshop for us. Other things? Coosh. Coosh, yes. Yeah, well that's it, I'm also on the committee for Inkrinik, so every July we have put on this huge festival in Peel, so there's a lot of work behind the scenes preparing for that. And we do use it as a showcase for mixed musicians, and that is a big aim of it as well to have mixed musicians alongside the Celtic counterparts on the stage, and also to make relations. So with Celtic for Inter-Celticness as well, I help organise the delegation for Lorion, that's with Granny Sheared and Adley Sheared, they're the delegates but behind the scenes I help them, and put them in touch with musicians and artists, etc. Yeah, do you think the job has changed dramatically over these? It has, yeah, yeah. When I first started it was just quite low key, it was a one-year contract in Ramsey Grammar School, and it was specifically to produce these resources, so I worked with the heads of music in all the secondary schools to produce a pack, where the children in years seven and eight could learn about Mank's music. Since then we've got a much higher profile, Instant John's Culture Van, and we've got the Visitor Centre, we've got websites, so manksmusic.com, developed out of a database that Dr. Chintzia Yates first developed 20 years ago. Now it's a fully functioning website for your one-stop shop for Mank's music and dance. So I am daily inputting into that, putting new pieces up. We have video tutorials produced, so we've got lots of a growing collection of Mank's dance videos. But we also film performances, which can be used for, well, the cap for posterity, but also for educational reasons. So manksmusic.com has become a big part of my job, uploading, and also a place for people to book performers. So we've got festivals asking who, which Mank's bands, can come and perform, or weddings, they're looking for caddy bands, or a harpist. So there's all that. And part of my educational work as well, each month is to organise harp lessons. So we have 22 harp students. That's amazing. It is. It is. So Rachel Hare comes over from Scotland, a wonderful teacher, and she's produced two books of Mank's students for harp. So she comes over, I organise those lessons, but we also have Brie Mank's youth movement, so I run that once Saturday every month. And that's an informal session for any young musicians, age 10 to 18, where they learn some Mank's tunes, and we make arrangements, learn new songs, go out busking. We have the Big Brie weekend every October, which explores all elements of Mank's culture. And I also organise Scram, which is the older group. It's like a teenage pop band, a pop folk band. And we have that led by David Kilgallon, who's a very, very well-known Mank's musician, plays for Mick Leer, and he runs that for us, so that's every fortnight. And any particular highlights do you think over the two decades for you? I know it's a tricky question that one, because you have to think of all my lordy. I think, well, it's great to see how culture of Anna has come in general, really. And I hope that I've been part of that, just having that ambition to bring what we were just like, in a little office, Ramsey Grammar School, and then Brisha joined, and we were in the centre of Mank's studies, and then we were at the nunnery, and we had this ambition to grow it, and Charles Garde, obviously massive influence as well. So we've actually got this building, which gives us a profile, and I think that's been brilliant. We've expanded the team, James Franklin, so online resources coordinator. It's a great work there. Yeah, so I think that it's been a great thing, overall, for Mank's culture. Just that higher profile, people can access whatever they need to know from us. So I think that's been a great achievement in the last 20 years. And just finally, what do you think the importance of all the work that's done here is that the both preservation and development of Mank's culture, what's the importance for you and the team to the element? Well, certainly, yeah, the preservation is important, and we're always looking back at what has been gone before, but certainly development and taking our culture forward is our priority. I think our job is to encourage and get other people to take ownership of Mank's culture, go with it, be creative, particularly with children, and I think with the Mank's Folk Awards and Brie, going into schools, that is the key to enabling young people who live in the Isle of Man to feel proud of their traditions and that there's something unique that they have. And that's a very special thing, so hopefully that's what we are doing well. Thank you for making it to the end of the Mank's Radio Newscast, you are obviously someone with exquisite taste. May I politely suggest you might want to subscribe to this and a wide range of Mank's Radio podcasts at your favourite podcast provider, so our best bits will magically appear on your smartphone. Thank you. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] (gentle piano music)