Letter from the Director of Music and The Arts - 9th March 2016

10 March 2016

It has been a fantastic week so far with our much-anticipated production of Beauty and the Beast taking place to packed audiences. All of the students involved have been performing excellently. With this year’s production fully underway, we have already started to plan next year’s Musical! For anyone who has been in the audience so far or in the audience tonight or tomorrow, watch out for the clues about which Musical it is during the show. We intend to hold some early auditions during the summer term so pupils have the summer to start to prepare material so we can start rehearsals at a much earlier point than this year. More details to follow on this but we hope we will have lots of enthusiastic students wanting to take part after the success of Beauty and the Beast.

In other Music news, the School Orchestra is still accepting new players and is now nearly at 40 players strong. With our eyes fixed on the Evening of International Music on March 24^th, the pupils are starting to become excited to show off the hard work that they have been doing during their CCA rehearsals on Mondays. This ensemble has really improved during this academic year and I have been pleased to be able to start to give them much more challenging music to perform.

For our School Choirs, again we have been trying to really be ambitious with our music selections, even for our youngest pupils. Currently Rainbow Review are learning an ABRSM Grade 2 song whilst the Key Stage 2 Choir are performing pieces from the ABRSM Grade 4 syllabus. When you consider that a pupil taking Music at GCSE level to get an A* needs to be performing at Grade 5, you can see how ambitious we are being. These choirs will also be performing at the Evening of International Music on March 24^th.

My biggest plan for the future is to form a Jazz Band. There are now Brass and Saxophone lessons happening at school, adding this to the already existing rhythm sections should enable us to have a first rehearsal very soon so please watch this space. Also please remember that I still have instruments available for free loans to pupils so please take up this wonderful opportunity.