Music, Wellbeing and Leadership

Young Artist Musical Ambassadors (YAMA) Programme

The MMST is proud to be hosting its Young Artist Musical Ambassadors (YAMA) Programme, which develops the skills and talents of gifted emerging musicians of the next generation. Its main cohort, from the Junior Academy of the Royal Academy of Music (where Chika Robertson is a professor of violin), is raising awareness of the power of music for health and wellbeing within families, care homes and communities. Further details can be found on the song trees website at: www.songtrees.com

Video of our recent YAMA celebratory concert…

Leading Creative Collaborations

The Music Mind Spirit Trust trains musicians to facilitate creative collaborations through music.

Its Young Artist Musical Ambassadors (YAMA) Programme combines musical leadership and scientific research through exciting collaborative partnerships with eminent individuals and leading organisations including the Royal Academy of Music, X-System Ltd, University of Oxford, Southampton University, Bookham & Harrison Farms, Live Music Now, Character Scotland, and the Royal Society of Public Health. Close care home partnerships have been forged with Cedar Court (Cranleigh, Surrey) and Stonehill House (Haddenham, Buckinghamshire).

We are pleased to announce our new international YAMA cohort in Spokane, Washington, USA with SongTrees Young Artist Musical Ambassadors from Holy Names Music Centre, in partnership with Spokane Public Libraries.

MMST’s ground-breaking cross-disciplinary work into Music, Wellbeing and Leadership commenced over 15 years ago with its SongTrees ‘3G’ Project. With initial funding from the DfES and Arts Council England, it has been credited as being the UK’s first large-scale intergenerational music project bridging together state, public and special needs schools with children, parents and grandparents.
SongTrees’ music-mentorship model was underpinned from the start by musical and scientific research by Prof John Zeisel, Prof Paul Grob and Dr Lyudmila Nurse to raise awareness about dementias and ageing through reinvigorating musical memory.

Through his pioneering work via high-impact music leadership programmes from as far back as the 1980s at eminent international business schools such as at Ashridge and Harvard, Paul Robertson explored some of the complex psychodynamics that support the creative process in the ‘Leading Creative Collaborations’ programme: the grace and charisma that characterise the public image of successful musical ensembles belie the numerous tensions and jealousies at play within the personal and professional lives of the members. Paul was for 38 years a founder and leader of the internationally acclaimed Medici Quartet. He drew on this top level performance experience, together with his profound knowledge of Music and the Brain, to create unique insights into our innate ‘hardwired’ systems of Integrated Intelligence. Paul brought together analytic ‘cognitive’ systems thinking with more intuitive, or even ‘instinctive’ experience, to illumine the complex contemporary issues around Leadership, Organisational Intelligence and Creativity. He was Visiting Professor in Music and Medicine to the Peninsula Medical School and an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.

‘Paul Robertson and the Medici String Quartet’ Harvard Business School [HBS 9-607-083]

by Prof. Robert D.Austin and Shannon O’Donnell

“….I only had one major crisis in the Quartet that I considered to be an onstage musical crisis which happened quite late on. There was a great deal in the dynamic of the group that I was deeply unhappy about by then…In many ways it was the deepest crisis of my life, though it will seem like nothing to you I’m sure. I felt as if the whole truth of my life was at stake- what I spent my whole lifetime doing was at stake……’

You can explore ‘High Note: Managing the Medici String Quartet’ on the Harvard Business School website with the button below: