Workshops 1 to 4 were put together by Fraser Trainer as a guide or starting point for a composition project.

Between 29th February and 25th March 2000 Fraser and members of the London Sinfonietta carried out the project with GCSE music groups from four schools:

• Lord Grey School, Bletchley
• St. Thomas More Secondary School, London
• Dorothy Stringer School, Brighton
• Cardinal Newman School Brighton

This and following LS pages provide examples of the work created with the Bletchley and London Schools, and how the workshops were adapted by Fraser.

 

SESSION 1

After several warm-up exercises and exploring the instruments to be used, we divided the group into two halves sharing the instrument types between them and made the four chords outlined in the Harmony section of workshop one (see below):

2.1 Using the six note chord from Dérive as a model, ask each group to invent on their instruments a) a new inversion of the Dérive chord b) a new transposition of the Dérive chord c) a new inversion of the transposed chord. Encourage each chord to be in changing registers and spacing. With the original chord, each group will have four chords to play.

 

Example 1: St. Thomas More group chords

After creating these the students experimented with the length, dynamics and colour of the notes within each chord to achieve a sense of phrase when combining all the chords in sequence. This was to form the harmonic structure for the composition.

Example 3: Lord Grey School, chord sequence

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