Orchestra · Creative Learning · Young People · Brahms · Barbican
The residency
Young people from Newham, Redbridge and Hackney spent two days developing original creative responses to Brahms and his music as part of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s Barbican residency.
The work culminated in a pre-concert foyer performance before the group attended the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s Brahms concert that evening.
Working with repertoire creatively
The aim was not simply to explain Brahms or reproduce fragments of the score. The young musicians were invited to listen, improvise, compose and discover their own relationships with the musical material before returning to the orchestral work with greater ownership and curiosity.
Why this matters
Orchestral creative learning can sit alongside high-level performance without becoming a simplified version of the concert. It can create a parallel artistic experience in which young people encounter repertoire as makers as well as listeners.
Afterwards, an audience member remarked on how fully the young people seemed to take advantage of the opportunity and engage with the concert.
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