C R E AT I V I T Y I N T H E C L A S S R O O M S A N D B E YO N D
#LEHMusicLivesOn The pandemic has seen concert halls, theatres and stages across the UK fall empty. Live performances have been one of the most-missed casualties of Covid-19. In schools, with Government recommendations restricting singing and playing together, it was time to get creative in order to let music live on reveals LEH Director of Music Miranda Ashe. In the first lockdown, in March 2020, the LEH Music Department created three virtual choir performances by recording videos and audio for Cantata and the Holles Singers to learn their lines at home. We sent these out together with scans of the music and the singers recorded their individual lines from home and uploaded them to a google drive. Our producer then edited and mixed these and we synched all the videos to create three virtual performances. The first was a performance of ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ to commemorate
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VE Day. The second was a life-affirming mashup called ‘The Bright Side’ and our final project was a performance of Howard Goodall’s ‘Loving Kindness’, written in honour of the sacrifices made by the NHS workers throughout the pandemic. In September, we returned to school, but music was constrained by rehearsals in year-group bubbles, leaving teachers mostly able only to run small-scale repertoire within those bubbles. So we decided to try broadcasting simultaneous rehearsals to all members of, for example, the Symphony Orchestra, and then record
in year-bubbles and multitrack it all to produce a final performance. This has implications in terms of hours and effort needed – and indeed, we found ourselves making many recordings for this – when you have a grade six tuba player and diploma violinist in Year 7, it’s clear that recording them together is going to be carnage… We discovered that creative thinking helped enormously! There is an open-air courtyard in the centre of the department so we put the flutes in the rooms opening off it with the doors ajar and the conductor with one year-bubble in amongst the ferns.
