Today Sound and Music, and Making Music (the UK’s membership organisation for leisure-time music) are excited to announce the pairings selected for Adopt a Music Creator 2022. The year-long project pairs leisure-time music groups with an emerging music creator for a year, culminating in a premiere performance, recording and radio broadcast.
The project began as Adopt a Composer in 2000, inspiring over 120 hugely diverse works and performances by music creators and leisure-time music groups of all types and genres across the UK. Now known as Adopt a Music Creator, the project has broadened its scope for more opportunities and collaborations.
While music groups get a chance to participate in the creative process and discover new music, music creators have an opportunity to form a close working relationship with their group – something not always possible with professional commissions – allowing them to respond to the group’s unique personality and interests. Each pairing is assigned an experienced mentor to support and guide the creator and group, helping the process run smoothly.
Alongside the pairings of one group and one music creator, a Collaborate Pathway, allows two music groups to apply to work together with a matched music creator.
The Adopt a Music Creator 2022 pairings are:
- Edgar Divver and Bedfordshire Woodwind Academy Flute Ensemble
- Joshua Brown and Glasgow Orchestral Society
- Emily Peasgood and Oxted Band
- Dominic Matthews and Singing for Pleasure, Warwick
- Hannah Fredsgaard-Jones and Voices of Exmoor
- Collaborate Pathway: Caitlin Harrison, Aldworth Philharmonic Orchestra and Reading Youth Orchestra
Find out more about about the pairings here
Barbara Eifler, Chief Executive of Making Music, said:
“Adopt a Music Creator is a very special project, pairing professional music creators and leisure-time music groups for an experimental creative process. Yes, the result will be a piece written specifically for each group, but it’s not all about the end product: running this project under Covid-19 has highlighted how the journey is as important as the final concert, with groups and music creators endlessly inventive about how to connect, get to know each other and have fun exploring new sound worlds, even when inhabiting a mostly digital world.”
Hannah Bujic, Co-Head of Artist Development, Sound and Music, said:
“We’re thrilled to introduce the music creators and groups as they begin their time together on this unique, challenging and deeply rewarding programme. With uncertainties and challenges to ways of working continuing this year, there is ever more need for the dedication and imagination that the participants on Adopt a Music Creator unfailingly bring to the creative process. We look forward to joining them on their collaborative journeys.”
Although the pandemic has thrown up huge challenges to music making, leisure-time music groups and the professionals they work with have shown time and again how resilient and creative they are even under difficult circumstances.
Last year’s Adopt a Music Creator project went ahead as planned, with the selected pairings adapting to a new world of Zoom sessions and socially distanced rehearsals, soon to culminate in their much-awaited premieres. Read more about their creative journeys on the Making Music blog.
You can also hear a selection of new works created from the 2019/20 round of projects on BBC Radio 3 from 17 to 21 January, with one piece broadcast daily following the Radio 3 in Concert broadcasts which begin at 7.30pm.
Find out more about Adopt a Music Creator on the Making Music projects pages. For more information, contact Sally Palmer, Making Music Projects Manager, at sally@makingmusic.org.uk
Adopt a Music Creator is run by Making Music in conjunction with Sound and Music, the national organisation for new music, and funded by the PRS Foundation and Philip and Dorothy Green Trust.