Tatty Theo
The Brook Street Band aims to provide a quality experience of classical music for children and families that do not normally engage with artistic activities outside school. Specialising in Handel’s music, it seeks to develop the musical skills and confidence of all participants, as well as increasing parents’ knowledge and awareness of their children’s musical abilities. This is achieved though engagement with instrumental and vocal music, both in and outside the classroom, including accessing local hubs and community music groups. Key to the success of the project is the Band’s own wish to expand its own skills base by working with specialist colleagues.
I formed The Band in 1995, since when it has established itself as one of the country’s foremost interpreters of Handel’s music. The Band has a busy UK and European concert schedule at venues including Wigmore Hall, South Bank Centre, Snape Maltings, Dartington, Barcelona Early Music Festival, and Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival. Its prizes include BBC Radio 3 Young Artists’ Forum and the Byrne Award given by the Handel Institute for Handel scholarship. The Band’s recordings are frequently featured on Classic FM, and it regularly broadcasts live for BBC Radio 3.
As an award-winning ensemble specialising in Handel, The Band sees education and audience development as integral to its work and believes it can enthuse and inspire a generation of children through baroque music, bringing alive Handel’s music and times. Handel’s genius in expressing emotion provides the perfect vehicle for engaging young listeners and beginning their journeys as singers, players and composers. This wide-ranging educational work is supported through The Brook Street Band Trust.
The National Plan for Music Education states that ‘great music education is a partnership between classroom teachers, specialist teachers, professional performers and a host of other organisations’. It is with this in mind that The Brook Street Band has designed its flagship project ‘Getting a Handle on Handel’. In addition to its work within schools, this project aims to bridge the gap between school music-making and what happens at home and outside school. The Band has formed a partnership with its local music hubs, and other partners include The Wigmore Hall, the Handel House Museum and Snape Maltings, thus extending the remit of the project outside the school gates. Parents can be involved either as choir members or as part of community orchestras, set up in each location.
‘Getting a Handle on Handel’ commenced in Autumn 2012, focusing on Handel’s life and music, and linking this to wide areas of the national curriculum. It twins an inner-city community in London with a rural one in Suffolk, working with over 500 primary-age children in the two schools on a sustained basis, with over 60 parents/carers, 15 teachers and hundreds more audience members at performance events. As these communities differ, so do some of their perceptions about musical aspirations and achievement. By engaging them in a joint project and by creating films and video diaries (enabling the schools to share their work), The Band aims to broaden horizons in both settings and create meaningful links between rural and inner-city children and their teachers. It has worked closely with each school, enabling the project to be tailored to the school’s curriculum and to focus input where it is most needed.
The Band believes that Handel is a perfect vehicle for bringing these two different communities together. His life and music have great relevance to 21st-century children’s lives. Entrepreneurial Handel was an immigrant, used to new challenges, new languages and quick-thinking. His ability to assimilate new ideas led to huge developments in European musical life. He understood how to communicate emotion through text and music, bypassing many of the stuffy conventions that had previously governed musical thought. As access to recorded music online increases, today’s children are in a unique position to counter any social inhibitions about classical music that their parents’ generation may have had. It is just as easy for children to search for a Handel aria on YouTube as for a current pop song, and many of our students have done just that, happily adding Handel to their playlists!
Immersing the children in an eighteenth-century sound world provides them with a key to understanding and appreciating baroque music and nurtures their capacities for performance and composition. The grand finale of the project is the commission of a Handelian-style community ‘oratorio’ by renowned composer Matthew King, winner of the RPS Education Award, and by librettist Alasdair Middleton. Taking the rural and urban exchange theme as his starting point, Matthew has led the creation of a developmental, cross-genre, community work, with the children’s texts, music and sampled environmental sounds woven in. He is fusing The Brook Street Band’s ‘old’ sound-world with live electronics updating baroque concept of ‘continuo’, and also incorporating children’s and adult choirs with professional vocal soloists. The new work (loosely modelled on Handel’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato) will receive its world premiere at Snape Maltings on 10 July 2015.
During the three-year course of this ground-breaking project, The Band has delivered 4 mini-projects per year, each with a different theme. These have encompassed areas including composition, choral singing, instrumental playing, making brass instruments, set and costume design, creating a libretto, and baroque dance. The projects have been led by BSB lead musicians plus specialist guest artists. Each project has included a whole-school assembly with live performances by The Band, plus an opportunity for the school and parents to view a short performance by the participating children.
May 2014 saw an end-of-year performance at London’s prestigious Wigmore Hall, bringing children from both schools together. For many of the Suffolk children, this was their first visit to London. The concert showcased musical material created in workshops, and allowed all the participants to meet each other and combine forces and sing as one choir. The Band also performed, giving the children a concert in a more formal setting than their own schools. This was combined with a trip to the Handel House Museum.
There are further plans to extend the project beyond these two schools. Interest has been expressed from various Festivals, which would like to explore similar work in their own communities. The fact that the whole project has been logged via films, blogs and video diaries has created a resource for further study in the future.
See an update on the project in 2019.