Suitable for Years 3 – 6
- Focusing on creativity: instrumental, vocal, dramatic
- Children work with musicians and an actress to create their own performance
- Enrichment for literacy: making music for traditional stories, myths, legends, melodrama or poetry
- Developing listening, performing, composing and appraising skills
- In an hour-long session a class of 30 develops and performs their own work
- Workshop content can be tailored to the curriculum or other individual requirements
"Children...improvise, and develop their own musical compositions, in response to a variety of different stimuli, with increasing personal involvement, independence and creativity. National Curriculum in Music. Key Stage 2"
Creative music and drama workshops are now being offered by Counterpoise. The sessions are led by animateur Barbara Honeyball, who has worked in music education for many years: as a music specialist in the London Borough of Barnet and latterly as Director of Music at South Hampstead High School junior department. She now works part-time for Sing Up! in Hertfordshire, and composes for children's and adult voices. Joined by actress Ann Marcuson and concert pianist Iain Farrington, Barbara will inspire children to create their own performances. Students are introduced to existing myth/legend material set to music – beginning with a short professional performance of an engaging melodrama such as Sibelius’s Wood Nymph – and encouraged to develop their own spontaneous responses. The idea is to harness students’ own creativity to produce a whole-class work involving storytelling, acting, composing and performing
Suitable for Years 10 and above
- Designed to appeal to students of music, film, photography and art
- Workshops involving silent film with live accompaniment performed by violin, saxophone, trumpet and piano
- Two classic 1920s films, Ghosts Before Breakfast and The Fall of the House of Usher, one humorous, a foretaste of Monty Python, the other presaging German Expressionist cinema
- Highlighting of pioneer film techniques and their underscoring by musical accompaniment
- Discussion of collage and found film
- Students with instruments participate in accompaniment, improvising to silent film
- Opportunity for students to conduct/coordinate group improvisation
These workshops are aimed at older children and young adults studying a variety of art forms, tapping into current preoccupations with film/visuals. They are particularly relevant for music students at GCSE and A level, who acquire experience of improvising with film, which helps to stimulate creative ideas for composition.
The content of the workshops reflects the cross-fertilisation of the arts characteristic of the 1920s, a phenomenon replicated today in mixed-genre forms and fusion of all kinds. We draw attention to such historical parallels, bringing classic works alive for a modern audience, while informing students about significant 20th-century movements such as Dada, Surrealism and Expressionism.
The potential is there for schools/colleges to record students’ performances and/or group improvisations and to place those recordings on websites or YouTube.
Suitable for all age groups
Workshops involving saxophone, trumpet and piano incorporating Britten’s Boogie Woogie from This Way to the Tomb, movements from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera Suite and Schulhoff’s Hot Sonata. We introduce the instruments and discuss their use in classical and jazz forms such as boogie woogie, blues, tango and shimmy. Students also get the opportunity to form a percussion section for the ensemble.
