NMC Education: Handel Hendrix and RSBC co-composition project

I’m Joanna, the Development and Education Co-ordinator at NMC, and I’m writing today about an Education project we were lucky enough to help facilitate last summer.

Handel Hendrix London are a music charity which grew from the amazing fact that the composer George Frideric Handel and the musician Jimi Hendrix lived in next-door houses (albeit three and a half centuries apart). The charity exists to keep the houses, in Mayfair, as a museum, as well as to do education work around these two pioneering musicians and more broadly. They approached us with a partnership project, working together with the Royal Society for Blind Children (RSBC) as well as The Sixteen choir, to do a co-composition workshop with some of the young people who the RSBC work with over the summer holiday. NMC’s involvement with this, as with much of our Education work, was to include a recording aspect for the project; to professionally record the final composition of the young people’s in order to give them a taste of what it is like to be a professional composer in the 21st century, as well as to give them a lasting record of their creativity which they could listen to again and again.

The project was initially intended to take place at Handel Hendrix House, but due to renovation works, it instead took place at the RSBC’s premises, right by the River Thames in East London. These are beautiful very recently built facilities which are impressive, welcoming, and of course accessible. It was a joy to work there for a few days!

Composer, singer, and workshop facilitator Ben See worked with the young people for two days before NMC arrived on the final day of the project to record the new composition. Ben had built up a really lovely sense of community in the group, which consisted of young people from London and beyond, mostly in person but some on Zoom, ranging in age from seven to seventeen, all of whom were blind or partially sighted and some of whom had additional educational needs. Arriving on the final day to discover a new composition, the words and music which had been written by the group together with Ben, was really exciting. This process had explored lyric writing and singing together, with much of the music devised by playing games and developing material through improvisation. It was a joy to witness composing be done in such a collaborative and accessible way.

On the day of the recording, Creative Director of NMC Ellie Wilson also visited the RSBC to give a presentation to the young people about NMC and the recording industry. They then had a session with me, to come up with an album cover which represented their piece of music. I was a little bit nervous about the process of making an album cover with a group of blind and visually impaired young people as I didn’t want to make assumptions or say the wrong thing about what they wanted. However, they were creative, imaginative, and full of ideas about what they might want to represent the piece they had written with Ben – initially throwing around ideas and concepts like ‘hope’ and ‘excitement’ and ‘not being held back’, which materialised into ideas for the cover of open doors, flowers, and bright colours. I then quickly put together a few different options for the covers and talked them through with the young people in detail, and they settled on the final cover which you can see below.

The young people also chose a name for themselves as a group: 'The Creative 10', after the vocal group The Sixteen who had come in to record their piece.

In the afternoon of the final day, members of The Sixteen choir came together with the young people and Ben to record their new creation, which had been transcribed and arranged by Ben in a late night composition session between days two and three of the project (something that will sound familiar to many composers out there!). Recording engineer Adaq Khan was also present at the RSBC to record the piece, ensuring that everything was sounding brilliant and giving the young people a taster of the kind of work that goes on in the music industry – including with NMC’s usual releases – to make an album happen. We had done a site visit before the workshop week to check what space might be best for the recording, listening out for ambient sounds such as the River Thames swooshing and weights being dropped in the gym on the floor above! We managed to find a setup which allowed Adaq to make a professional quality recording of the piece.

Following getting everything for the piece ‘in the can’ (this is industry speak for it all being recorded correctly across a few different takes, with Adaq then taking those recordings away to mix and master), the day finished with a live performance of the piece with the young people and The Sixteen, for the staff at the RSBC. This was a really joyful and quite moving moment as the young people clearly had such a sense of pride in their new piece and had such fun performing it!

You can listen to the young people's piece here:

With thanks to Handel Hendrix London for facilitating the project; the Royal Society for Blind Children for hosting the project; Ben See for leading the workshops and co-creation of the piece; members of The Sixteen for singing on the recording and working with the young people; Adaq Khan for recording, mixing, and mastering the piece.

NMC's Discover platform is created in partnership with ISM Trust.