Community Music at the Whitechapel Gallery
Last month, 2nd year students on our Foundation Degree in Creative Music Production and Business course were given the opportunity to collaborate with the Whitechapel Gallery to create music in response to their ‘Is This Tomorrow?’ exhibition. It culminated in an all day event where members of the public came and interacted and watched a viola player improvise live over the tracks that were made.It all started with an assignment set in the second year - the Music for Installation task - which takes a different focus from simple track creation and goes beyond this by composing something that fits or reflects an art installation. The theme this year was to create something that would suggest what the future would sound like, echoing the theme of the exhibition where a group of 10 artists created artworks with the same remit.
Also as part of the assignment, musicians from the Orchestra Of The Age of The Enlightenment were invited down to Community Music's studios to improvise and perform under the direction of the students with the theme of the exhibition in mind. On the day, there was double bass, clarinet and viola players. They were asked to get the musicians to perform something that would fit their remit and then also use this as an exercise to record the musicians’ sounds and performance in our professional level recording environment.
Students then composed a wide variety of interpretations which are all available to listen on Whitechapel Gallery’s’ Soundcloud. It’s a testament to the calibre of talent and how far these students have come.
Whitechapel Gallery then invited our students back to take part in their Youth Takeover Day which had 3 groups of young people sharing, performing and exhibiting their responses to the exhibition. Young dancers performed from the Siobhan Davies Dance School, Whitechapel Gallery’s own youth group ‘Duchamp & Sons’ exhibited and performed their own responses to the exhibition, and Community Music students had a whole day of playback and audio interaction interaction. Visitors to the gallery were given a barcode where they could then immediately listen to Community Music student’s songs on the gallery’s Soundcloud as they walked around. Then, our students invited members of the public to provide spoken word and vox pops to be dropped onto the tracks made in response to the exhibition. The day culminated with Katie the viola player from the OAE stunningly improvising over the recordings the students had previously made.
It was such a wonderfully interactive and creative day, thanks to all that were involved!
