The Music Workshop Company Blog

Each month the Music Workshop Company publishes two blogs. One blog, written by the MWC team addresses a key issue in Music Education or gives information about a particular genre or period of music. The other blog is written by a guest writer, highlighting good practice or key events in Music Education. We hope you enjoy reading the blogs.

To contribute as a guest writer please email Maria@music-workshop.co.uk

Posts tagged “MUSIC COMPOSITION”

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BBC Young Composer 2020

Posted on 29th February 2020 at 18:23

The BBC have launched this year’s BBC Young Composer competition. Previously known as the BBC Proms Inspire Competition and the BBC Young Composer of the Year, the annual competition is open to composers aged between 12 and 18 from across the UK. Winners take part in a development programme and work with a mentor composer on a composition for the BBC Concert Orchestra, to be performed at the BBC Proms in 2021 in a special young composers concert. The closing date for entries to the competition is 5pm on Thursday 11 June 2020.

2020 – the year of Beethoven?

Posted on 14th January 2020 at 10:41

December 2020 marks the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.

The event seems to have split the Classical Music community.

Some individuals and organisations see the occasion as an opportunity to celebrate Beethoven’s musical achievements.

Others suggest that Beethoven’s music is popular enough and performances and recordings of it are already so plentiful that audiences should be exploring new repertoire and lesser known composers, and particularly work by underrepresented groups.

Dungeons, Detail and Design

Posted on 30th January 2019 at 14:00

Composer Steven Coltart on writing music for gaming…

The way young people experience music is changing. October 2018 saw the publication of the findings of a YouGov survey in association with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, which showed the increasing influence of video game music and its value as an access point for classical music.

This access point is valuable both experientially and creatively, as opportunities open up for composers to work in sound design.

In this month’s guest blog, The Music Workshop Company talks to composer Steven Coltart about his work writing and producing the score for Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier.

Music for Peace

Posted on 31st August 2018 at 14:30

21st September is World Peace Day, or the International Day of Peace. It was established in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly, and, in 2001, the General Assembly designated the Day as a period of non-violence and cease-fire.

This year’s Peace Day celebrates the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the theme is The Right to Peace.

Image: Paper Cranes, Children’s Peace Memorial, Hiroshima

The Extraordinary History of the Blues

Posted on 15th September 2015 at 16:00

The Blues developed towards the end of the 19th Century. It was first heard among the African-American communities who farmed the plantations of the Delta, a flat plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, an area so characteristic of the Deep South that it has been called The Most Southern Place on Earth.

In the mid 1800s the area had been one of the richest for cotton growing in the United States, attracting many speculative farmers who were dependent for labour on black slaves.