Making music as a hobby has a long tradition in the UK where there are an estimated 40,000 choirs and at least 20,000 instrumental groups including brass bands, amateur orchestras, sitar societies, folk groups, drumming circles, jazz bands, ukulele groups, and more, with over 3.3 million individuals involved.
Every community has such groups that bring people from all walks of life together to practise and perform music in their leisure-time on a regular basis.
Ex Urbe choirs give us a delightful insight on being paired with composer Chloe Knibbs.
If you Google ‘find the perfect relationship’ it will, in the blink of an eye, show you 635 million results.
Looking for a way to help protect arts education in schools? You can do this by simply writing a letter. Bacc for the Future, the Cultural Learning Alliance and What Next? have produced a toolkit to help you get started.
Making Music is delighted to announce that Dr Mark Lawrence has been awarded the national Lady Hilary Groves Prize for his outstanding contribution to music in the community.
Do you know a young person harbouring a passion for singing?
An audition with the National Youth Choirs of Great Britian (NYCGB) could be just the beginning of their musical journey.
NYCGB is made up of five choirs of 700 young people aged 9-25. It offers in depth residential courses and training programmes, performance opportunities and workshops, as well as outreach events all year round.
Any young singer, whatever their musical background.
Composer James Banner offers some initial thoughts following the announcement of his collaborative pairing with member group, Two Rivers Concert Band for Adopt a Composer.
You start playing football on a Saturday morning in your local park at the age of five, maybe because your dad did, or because that’s what your mates are doing, and you probably carry on until you leave school. By that time, maybe one of your friends has been picked for a local team or been talent-spotted by a scout.
But generally they won’t have been. All the same, you’ll probably mostly carry on with football: 5-a-side teams with work colleagues, adult village teams, pub or charity teams, helping out with the kids on a Saturday morning, attending matches.
Each year our Adopt a Composer project sets leisure-time choirs, orchestras and ensembles up with composers for a year to produce a new piece together. Meet this year's pairings.
Chloe is a Birmingham-based composer inspired by city life, folk tales and personal experiences. Included in the British Music Collection, Chloe is currently supported by the PRS Women Make Music Fund.
Online music school, Your Space Music Lessons has launched a new drive to make music tuition easier for families to access. In a new partnership with ‘rent to buy’ instrument service Duet Shop, new orchestral instruments can be obtained from just £7.50 per month.
For families who find it hard to budget for instruments and have little time to access quality tuition, the hope is that this partnership will enable more children and adults to learn from a broad range of orchestral instruments in their own home.
Composer Esmeralda Conde Ruiz on memory, archives and human nature as influences in her Adopt a Composer collaboration with The Fretful Federation Mandolin Orchestra.
It’s that awkward moment when you meet your neighbours for the first time on the staircase.You might smile, you might small talk, you might pretend not to see them. We all know how that feels like. But what if you ask a community orchestra to meet their neighbours?
For all our updates and opportunities
