School & Family Concerts

Some thoughts from Paul about creating orchestral experiences for young audiences

This is a time of great change in classical music. As orchestras strive to redefine their role in the 21st century and better serve their communities, a new and more inclusive approach is being driven, almost entirely, by their learning and participation programmes. And as a direct result, at long last, the look and feel of an orchestral concert are starting to change. 

Just think, if you took a photo of a symphonic concert today and applied the right kind of Instagram filter to it, that image could be of any orchestral event in the last 200 years. So if Beethoven was suddenly brought back to life, while he’d have no idea what to do with an iPhone, I bet he’d feel right at home in a modern concert hall.

Soon after I began working in orchestral education, I started to receive invitations to programme and present symphonic concerts for young people. This was a thrilling opportunity; imagine getting to introduce a whole new generation of listeners to music that you love - really love - played by world-class musicians.

I began to experiment by performing concerts aimed at very specific age groups, such as the under 5s, or 5-7-year-olds, 7-11s - and so on. The fatal flaw in many of the children’s concerts I had seen in the past, was that they just weren’t pitched correctly, or certainly not targeted enough. However, I quickly ran into some problems. 

The passive nature of sitting in a concert hall just didn’t fit with young people who were being brought up on a diet of songs which were less than three minutes a pop. Secondly, due to the vast size of the orchestra (and often the venue as well), the static nature of an orchestral event was less than appealing. Young people are extremely sophisticated consumers; could they ever imagine going to a gig without OLED screens and a spectacular lighting rig? Worst of all, certainly here in the UK, music was being marginalised in the school curriculum.

In primary schools, in particular, non-specialist teachers weren’t being given enough training and support to be confident in their music lessons. After a string of government initiatives, which valued only maths and language and aspired to turn every child into a merchant banker, schools were struggling to allocate enough time to the arts. 

So how much impact could my orchestral concert have on a young person’s life? 

The two essential elements I’ve found that ensure a successful orchestral event for young people are preparation and participation. 

I’ve always believed you can’t just throw the orchestra at young listeners and expect them to engage with the experience. We can do so much better than that, and of course, everything has to begin - not with the young audience - but with their teachers. So I started to view a schools concert, not as a standalone event, but as the culmination of a period of creative music-making in school.

I love working with non-specialist primary teachers, especially the ones who say ‘I am terrified to be here. I’m not musical. I don’t know anything about music. I just can’t do it’. BRILLIANT! You are my prime target. Because I know if I can inspire that teacher to make music, and most importantly to have fun being creative with music, then of course, they’ll take that love straight back to their class.

I’ve found the way to do it isn’t by bamboozling teachers (or their students) with a ton of facts or dates about a composer - such as Mozart  – it’s about finding a way for them to be hands-on with his melodies or harmonies or rhythms. Irrespective of how simplified those ingredients become, the challenge is to find an approach that’s so immediate and so straight-forward that a non-specialist teacher feels empowered to give it a go. And then, suddenly, Mozart’s music ceases to be this precious piece of high-art that has to be revered and instead becomes part of a creative and noisy activity in school using classroom percussion.

Then, having explored his music in school, when those children come along to hear the orchestra play Mozart in concert, they are so much more invested in the experience. The best letter I ever received after one of my schools’ concerts was from a child who asked - ‘How come the orchestra knew my tune?’. Though participation doesn’t have to be confined to the classroom – in fact, I believe it has even more value if it’s an integral part of the concert experience.

In almost all of my orchestral concerts for young people, there’s a participatory role for the audience. I’m not interested in inviting students to sit passively, only listening to the orchestra - my concerts are an open invitation for young people to perform with the orchestra too. Sometimes I do that using existing orchestral repertoire, but in the last decade, I’ve started to compose a whole series of works, especially for children to perform with professional musicians.

I think it’s essential that an audience feel equally valued in a concert performance. After all, the best thing about live art is that it’s a shared experience - but what if we take that engagement to the next level? Surely then, the long perceived barrier between stage and stalls, young and old, amateur and professional completely vanishes. And best of all, everyone in the hall is making music together.