Thank you for the Music!
The three strands of the curriculum of singing, performing and composing are taught across all key stages and in the foundation stage, and the children are also given opportunities to perform as part of key Collective Worship and special festivals within school time, but also have the chance to perform at other events.
Key Stage 2 attend the Young Voices Concert at Birmingham’s LG Arena every other year, learning songs and dances which culminate in a performance involving 5,500 pupils at the large stadium.
The Key Stage 2 choir have also performed as part of the Herefordshire Performing Arts Festival every year, winning their class in 2019, and have also performed within the local community at Birchams Grange Residential Home and Eastnor Castle for their Christmas celebrations.
Key Stage 1 have enjoyed partaking in singing projects alongside The Music Pool and ABF Music, attending Sing Spring with other schools in the cluster at Hellens in Much Marcle. They also started an inspirational music project with multi-prize-winning violinst Elisabeth Zeuthen Schneider which was wonderful despite being shorter than planned due to Covid.
In addition, we do partake in other music projects with other community organisations. Years 5/6 have taken part in a Music and Nature workshop inspired by the composer Schubert at Hellens in Much Marcle, where children were invited to bring their own instruments to contribute to a performance for family members and organisers at the end of the day. In this context, they also got to enjoy a professional string quartet playing the music of Schubert too! This summer our Wedding choir also took part in their first performance at Eastnor Church.
Along with all of this, we enjoy peripatetic music teachers that come in to our school and teach children on a one-to-one basis or in small groups across a range of instruments. We have been very pleased to see the number of pupils partaking in learning a musical instrument on the rise.
We are very lucky with all of the performance opportunities we are granted here at Eastnor and the variety of spaces we get to work in, and the different people we meet to perform with too.