by Author Lindsay H

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Spitalfields Music's Musical Rumpus at Happy New Ears festival

Sam Glazer, composer and MD of Musical Rumpus - Spitalfields Music's series of interactive operas reimagined for 0-2 1/2 year olds - reflects on an opportunity to share our learning with other organisations at the Happy New Ears international festival in Mannheim Germany (December 2017).

Most of the time, when I explain that I make operas for babies and toddlers, people’s responses range from bemused - “Don’t they cry/sleep/vomit all the way through?” - to incredulous - “wow… how does that work?”. To which the respective answers are “No, not usually” and “How long have you got?”

The babies, of course, have no such problems understanding the concept of opera. They already live in a strange and inexplicable universe, overwhelmed and delighted by a stream of sensory stimulation, barrelling headlong from one big emotion to the next. They are a fascinating public to work with; their eyes and ears are wide open, their creativity is boundless and their honesty is total.

When Spitalfields Music asked me five years ago to work with writer/director Zöe Palmer to grow their Musical Rumpus project, I was already an experienced early years music practitioner, and a cellist with a background in performing improvised and classical repertoire, but I’d never brought these two worlds together. The Musical Rumpus, which we’ve developed over a series of eight productions, is an open invitation to our young audience to play with us, and a challenge to ourselves as performers to respond to them and incorporate their contributions.

Our musical scores - sometimes arrangements of Monteverdi or Handel, sometimes newly commissioned original music - act as a tapestry to be further embroidered by the voices and actions of the children. Our youngest public may not yet be able to follow a narrative thread, but they are acutely sensitive to the shifting emotional dynamics of the music. Questions about opera, elitism and accessibility become meaningless in this context; we’ve seen extremely young people play with wonder and amazement inside the soaring melodies, catchy rhythms and gorgeous instrumental sounds of 17th- and 18th-century opera. And those young ears, as yet unconditioned by repeated exposure to more conventional sounds, are equally open to the experimental sonic textures of contemporary music.

Funded by Youth Music, our current programme of Musical Rumpus productions have been reaching libraries and children’s centres in Tower Hamlets, Barking & Dagenham and Newham. Through learning from audiences during each tour and research sessions before each new production, we are able to develop and grow the interaction and playfulness of the performances. We’ve also ventured further afield both nationally and internationally, and last month we had the opportunity to take our most recent show, Catch a Sea Star, to the Happy New Ears international festival in Germany. Organised by the National Theatre of Mannheim to mark ten years of their Junge Oper programme, this festival offered a showcase of new music theatre, from across Europe, for young people.

Alongside the festival there was a Congress bringing together theatre-makers, performers, programmers and students, accompanied by a distinctively German community of pedagogues (similar to our animateurs) and dramaturgs. It was fascinating to be present at the festival, with the opportunity to absorb a diverse programme of shows and to share reactions, questions and experiences with fellow artists and academics. Cultural differences were on clear display. With over 80 state-funded opera houses and strong political support for the music sector, German producers evidently feel a weighty responsibility to nurture and preserve their (indeed, our) rich cultural heritage. The advantages of this ecosystem are manifested in the standard 6-week rehearsal period (eye-wateringly generous by UK standards), in budgets that allow production values to match artistic ambition, and perhaps most interestingly, in the confidence that artistic integrity need not be compromised by commercial considerations.

This exposes a common pitfall in UK thinking, where it’s often assumed that in order to make a piece with broad appeal, it’s necessary to dumb down.  We have seen again and again that working with babies and their adults in economically disadvantaged areas of London is no different from working with any other public; if our work is created to a high standard and presented with love and care, people respond positively whatever their age and background.

I don’t think that classical music is any more or less culturally valid than any other genre - but I do believe that at its best, it has an intrinsic value which can be appreciated by everyone. So it was refreshing, in Mannheim, to be in an environment where no-one felt the need to apologise for presenting children with music that could patronisingly be described as high-brow or even avant-garde.

At the same time, this unapologetic advocacy for so-called high culture comes with its own risks. We saw one show where the performers were in such an exclusive relationship with their own artistic vision, their audience may as well have not been there. We heard in many conversations how the supportive yet burdensome infrastructure associated with the well-funded sector in Germany can prevent people from thinking creatively about innovations and alternative approaches. And the academic focus on our work, while signifying how seriously it is taken, can lead to a combative style of discourse which is anathema to the creative process.

We saw much to admire too, with some inspiring examples of best practice from across the continent - for example Antwerp’s Theater de Spiegel, whose Caban functions as a creative experiment space for artists and babies, and doubles as a nursery for embryonic new shows, which are truly co-developed with their young audiences. Korall Koral, from Norway, lavished a stunning degree of care on visual aesthetics, combined with a capella vocals emphasising space and experimentation. For a slightly older age group, Holland Opera’s 4 Musketeers offered a sensitive exploration of father absence, with a witty musical score by Oene van Geel.

It was great to present Musical Rumpus in this context, to be able to talk with composers, writers, directors and performers, and to see how other companies working in the same field are addressing similar questions around engagement, repertoire, co-devising, space and aesthetics. We have plenty of food for thought as we start work on our next Rumpus, touring community venues in East London in May 2017. Watch this space!

 

Sam Glazer

Composer/MD, Musical Rumpus