The
Ferny Grove State High School Instrumental and Choral Music (ICM) program involves around 300 students across 23 ensembles, including choirs, concert bands, string groups, orchestras, stage bands, and percussion, brass, and guitar ensembles. While the program is widely recognised for its high musical standards, its deeper purpose lies in creating the conditions where belonging, agency, and shared responsibility can grow through collective music-making.
What matters most to us is not just how the music sounds, but how people are with each other while making it.
Philosophy
We believe music-making is a powerful way for people to learn how to be human together.
Performing music at a high level invites students into deep processes of listening, interpretation, collaboration, and care. Through shared music-making, young people learn not only how sound works, but how relationships work - how to attend, respond, lead, follow, and belong within a group.
In music education, there is a long-held idea often referred to as the “glistening eye" - a way of describing that unmistakable look in a performer's eyes, at any age, that reflects enthusiasm, imagination, communication, and joy in music-making. It is difficult to define, but easy to recognise.
In our program, we understand this quality as aliveness - the presence that emerges when students are deeply engaged, connected to one another, and attuned to the music they are making together.
We see this aliveness as a fundamental indicator that authentic learning is taking place. When it is present, the musical, social, and intellectual benefits of music education are also present. It is often first noticed in the eyes, but felt across the whole ensemble: in how students listen, respond, and support one another.
From a research perspective, this aliveness is supported by synchrony - the shared timing, attention, and responsiveness that develops when people make music together.
We actively seek to nurture this aliveness by creating environments where students feel accepted, secure, and trusted - conditions that allow them to express themselves emotionally through music, take risks, and care for the shared work of the group.
Our program is a learning community, where growth happens not only through rehearsals and performances, but through the relationships formed between students, staff, families, alumni, and the wider community who gather around the shared work of music.
Benefits
Music education offers well-documented cognitive, academic, and artistic benefits. Just as importantly, it provides a rich context for developing empathy, imagination, and social awareness.
Through ensemble music-making of all sizes, students experience what it means to be part of something larger than themselves - where individual contribution matters, difference is valued, and meaning is created together.
These experiences support young people to develop important life capacities, including deep listening, cooperation, resilience, and a sense of responsibility toward others.
Methodology
Our approach emphasises collective music-making, embodied learning, and close attention to process.
We use movement, singing, memorisation, and imaginative repetition to help students inhabit the music physically and emotionally, not just intellectually. Repetition is used as a way of noticing more - hearing relationships, patterns, and possibilities that only reveal themselves over time.
A central part of our rehearsal process is story. We regularly engage students in open discussion about what the music might be expressing - the character, atmosphere, landscape, or emotional world it suggests. These conversations help ground a shared mood or intention, giving students a common point of reference for how the music might live and breathe.
Often, an entire story - with its own characters, images, and emotional arc - emerges through this collective exploration. When learning a new section or part together, we return to simple guiding questions: What could this be for us? What are we seeing? What are we feeling? In this way, students learn to find themselves - as a group - within the music they are making.
This shared sense-making supports ensemble alignment. It helps students listen more deeply, respond more sensitively, and play or sing with greater intention and coherence. Rather than being told exactly what the music should be, students contribute to shaping its meaning together.
Students are encouraged to understand how their individual part contributes to the whole, and how the quality of the ensemble depends on trust, listening, and shared intention.
Performances, including our annual Gala Concert, are treated not simply as showcases of achievement, but as communal offerings - moments where the shared story, learning, effort, and care are given back to the wider community.