For young musicians, lockdown was a hiatus for valuable in-person connection, but brought surprising benefits in terms of accessibility and equality of participants. Here, Becky, Orchestras Live's Regional Producer - North, discusses Cumbria Calling's ongoing attempts to achieve the best of both worlds in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Composition has been a key thread of our partnership with Cumbria Music Education Hub, and since 2016 Cumbria Calling young composer cohorts have co-created 7 new pieces of music, mostly inspired by the place where they live. Many of the pieces have been written for their youth orchestra to perform, and this year’s project, building on the legacy from Share Sound, is no exception.

Prior to the pandemic, due to the challenges of Cumbria’s geography, projects had been focused on particular areas of the County, with a residential offer to bring young people together for an intensive two days of music making. Last year with Share Sound, the purely digital creative process enabled young musicians from across the county to be recruited for and participate in the creative process. As Share Sound came to a conclusion, we began to explore what a hybrid offer could be, developing a project model that would enable us to navigate the uncertainties over the next year and ensure that creative work continued.

Creative workshops have been underway this term, led by music leaders James Redwood and Alice Phelps with the Cumbria Music Hub team taking the roles of supporting musicians. The workshops have been delivered digitally again, but this time with 2 days of live workshops during half term to provide that intensive live music-making experience. This enabled the Music Hub to continue to offer the opportunity to students across Cumbria as well as those who had joined previous Cumbria Calling cohorts.

The creative process began with a zoom introductory workshop introducing Cumbrian folk tunes as a creative stimulus. This was followed by two very productive live workshop days in the beautiful surroundings of Soundbeams in Penrith during half term. Exploring their improvisatory ideas, the young composers were able to build these in a more organic way as an ensemble and try combinations of sounds and musical ideas out in real time. They will produce two pieces from their work, one fully notated for the youth orchestra to perform and another a devised piece for the project ensemble.

Last week the team regrouped on zoom, listened to the midi playback of the outline score Alice Phelps had created and worked on refining it. Alice posed a series of compositional questions which were discussed in at times forensic detail, with incisive thoughts shared through discussion and in the chat. James Redwood shared the Sibelius score so they could explore refinements in real time. This was a detailed workshop on the nuts and bolts of compositional decisions and Alice has been sent away with development notes to work on.

With one final zoom workshop to go, the young composers will sign off their notated piece ready for the youth orchestra to begin rehearsing next term. In July, the youth ensemble’s concert will have a real focus on Cumbria’s co-created repertoire and they will be joined by the RPO for a coaching day prior to the performance. As well as the new piece, there will be performances of Found in Darkness from last year’s Share Sound project and Cumbria have also adopted repertoire created by another of our Share Sound projects. In the virtual Finale, they were particularly inspired by Durham’s approach to include whole class learning groups and next term they will be rehearsing Cumbria primary schools to join their youth orchestra for a performance of Forged by Fire.

Combining what we learnt about zoom as a creative space during the pandemic with live delivery has made for an interesting creative process. As this programme of work reaches its conclusion in July, it will be exciting to explore how we build on the learning from six years of Cumbria Calling, delivered live and digitally, for the future. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to young musicians gathering in Penrith in July for what promises to be an inspiring evening of music making, with young people’s creativity at its heart.