Confluence

Duchy Manor Middle School, Mere

A five week composition project was held at Duchy Manor Middle School in Mere to devise new processional music to accompany the first performance of Shreen Harmony on the streets of the town in December 1998. The children were set the task of composing music to be used as people walked down the street during the carolling.

The initial session was spent at the Shreen with the children drawing the patterns on the surface of the river in a variety of mediums. These pictures were then taken back into the classroom and used as inspiration for musical ideas, translating them via kinetic movement into sounds, pitch, tempo and structure.

From improvised ideas with voices, these then moved onto instruments. We worked to structure the ideas and then created a simple score, devised so as to hang together under the stress of a winter promenade performance. The children played drums, percussion, violin and handbells and joined forces with a small band of local instrumentalists (E flat horn, cornet, accordion and myself on soprano sax), we set forth to resound their watery music throughout the winter streets of Mere.