This is a compilation of new pieces we have created during our M4MCREATE project.
You can find out more about our project in our music videos here.
Here are the album tracks for you to listen to, download and enjoy:
We’d love to know what you think. Leave a comment on @musicforthemany.
Don’t forget to make a donation towards our work on Justgiving or on Localgiving.
We started our project by asking young people in Todmorden to write some words describing their experience of life during the pandemic. There was a huge range of contrasting emotions in the response. The result is this operatic collage of baroque-inspired counterpoint called Lockdown.
When one of our young musicians shared the lyrics of I Miss Hangin’ Out it inspired us to write some rock riffs and we tried to include them all in this song. How many can you spot?
During the quiet of first lockdown in 2020 we grew more aware and appreciative of the sounds all around us in nature. We painted our sound picture in Birds, and all the birdsong here is played on our instruments, as we discover different ways of playing them.
When we discovered this new, haunting poem, Life is Fading, by a brilliant young Todmorden poet, we felt that it captured so much of the sadness of the pandemic and we set the words to some of the melodic phrases by our young composers. The percussion part is made from sounds we recorded in and around our homes.
Sometimes the drama of life in lockdown was in noticing small things, patterns, movements in our surroundings. The Swaying Tree, with lyrics by another of our young poets, and music based on a pentatonic piano riff and a rhythmic cycle by our young composers, is a slightly strange celebration of such things looking out on a snowy day. The song begins with an office chair rolling up to the window.
One of our visiting artists recorded a video sound diary of a walk along an icy path. When we watched this, the young musicians turned their written reactions into rhythmic and melodic phrases, which we played on our instruments. When we recorded these and put them all together, it created a dramatic orchestral piece of Ice Music, accompanied by the real life crunch, crack and squeak of the ice.
Some of our workshop sessions took place online when the restrictions meant we couldn’t meet up in school. Our inspiration came from what we could see from the windows of our homes. The sentences which began “From My Window” turned into something quite poignant. The star of the piece, however, is the singing dog.
When the children were making music with things the found in the school garden, they got distracted, understandably, by the new chicks that had just hatched. In honour of fluffy friends, they performed this rhythmic piece, Chick Chick Chicky!
During our project we explored Punjabi Sufi music, and learnt to sing a qawwali about the Sufi saint Baba Farid. This inspired us to compose a meditative piece using the melodic technique of South Asian music, which we called Baba Farid. Developing this ideas further, and adding a 6-beat dadra rhythm from Indian classical music, we made a song called In Isolation, putting the sadness of isolation alongside the healing power of friendship and community.
Restrictions meant that we couldn’t sing together in person, and so we learnt to sign our songs in BSL. This opened a new, fascinating world of expression for us, and was an opportunity to look at the experience of the pandemic for deaf people, in a world behind face masks. Our signing song, Behind the Mask, is about hope: “The sun comes out from behind the cloud and the crescent moon will soon be full again”.