Central to the BA (Hons) Music degree at Lincoln is the inclusion of public-facing work, through the annual Music Conference, performances in venues across Lincoln, and festivals and events from Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. Across much of the last academic year this would have been impossible in the traditional way.
To address this, staff and students adopted livestreamed performances and events across all modules with a public-facing element. During the strictest lockdowns this involved students performing and presenting from their homes, offering a particularly powerful community-building experience in the difficult weeks of January–February. Once back on campus, students used multicamera technology within the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, presenting work to fellow students, but also friends and family from around the UK, applicants, and the wider public. Students also created video-based work at venues across the city, including Lincoln Cathedral, in the Arboretum, on the NDH rooftop sculpture terrace, and even on a boat in the Brayford Pool.
The impact of this innovation was to give students the performance opportunities they needed and expected, but, more than this, students have developed high-level skills in streaming, camera operation, video editing and audio engineering that will place them in a strong position when entering employment in future years.
