LEAVING THE SILENCE BEHIND
The musical year
Mozart is alleged to have said that ‘ the music is not in the notes , but in the silence between .’ This year , there has been rather too much silence in the Music department . A necessary silence . It ’ s not just the pianos that have been silenced and it ’ s not just the drums that have been muffled . Everyone has been mourning the necessary reduction in ensemble opportunities and the cutbacks we have had to make to any musical experience that we have been able to offer . But music has not been entirely dead this year . From the broken shell which was lockdown music making , we have had to be creative in our thinking . Some reframing has been necessary .
It occurred to me that the first thing which needed reframing was the whole idea of musical performance . This is always an act of sharing , so what better way to share one ’ s playing than by performing to your family at home and recording yourself on your mobile phone at the same time ? I challenged the students to do this and over 150 of them responded , filling a dozen online iMovie concerts . Thus was the Virtual Platform Concert born . We filmed a number of platform concerts in The Space , with no audience , to share as virtual performances . Necessity is the mother of invention and the students themselves found novel ways still to organise the Sevenoaks singOFF , won this year by Scarlett Robinson and Louis Dunn , of Year 11 . Nick Beston has produced some quite amazing videos of his saxophone students all playing together well-known numbers , ranging from The Jungle Book to Glenn Miller standards – performances he carefully curated at home .
Singing has taken the biggest hit of all . I always thought aerosols were something you sprayed on yourself , but , along with ‘ furlough ’ and ‘ epidemiology ’, we all now know that an aerosol is a ‘ suspension of [ in this case viral ] particles , dispersed in air ’ and , more importantly , that the number of these increases
56 MUSIC REVIEW