A new immersive musical story with orchestral repertoire at its core, The Maple Tree, evolved from many years of work with young and family audiences co-produced by City of London Sinfonia and Orchestras Live. Devised and performed entirely by the orchestral musicians, it evolved naturally from the previous projects, in which the players had become increasingly invested.

Katherine Spencer, Principal Clarinet at City of London Sinfonia (CLS) reflects on her experience of devising The Maple Tree.

People think musicians are very creative but actually we spend a lot of time being told what to do. When CLS embarked on creating The Maple Tree I didn't really know what to expect. Along with Alexandra Wood (CLS Creative Director and Leader), Dan Bates (Principal Oboe) and Joely Koos (Co-Principal Cello), we were asked to put forward repertoire that we love as a starting point. These pieces were to come together in a musical offering for an audience of all ages, created and led by our team of musicians.

The participation team wanted the piece to be given birth by the musicians themselves and, to be honest, in the first instance I found this process rather difficult, struggling with the freedom we were given. Although we musicians are creative beings and artists in our own right, we are really very good at being told what to do by conductors and dutifully following detailed notes on the page from composers. At first, I just wanted to be told what to do!

So how to deal with this clean and creative sheet!

The creative team extended to Consultant Director, Elayce Ismail (who has a vast experience of theatre and opera productions) and Music Director and Composer Jessie Maryon Davies, who has expertise in participatory music. In our first devising session, they held us close with a very fun day of movement and acting workshop games, which really got the creative juices flowing. Using our instruments, we got to explore characters that we might like to bring into the story, sparking lots of ideas. It was interesting how quickly we found these characters and then stuck with them right through the devising process. Dan became a shy swan, myself a naughty squirrel, Alex a graceful bird and Joely our mother figure, of warmth and connection.

It wasn't long before the idea of a tree started to form through Joely’s performance, and the world of the woods in which we immersed ourselves, playing underneath her leaves. The Maple Tree was born and now we just needed to explore what could happen beneath those branches with our musical characters.

We were very lucky to have The Albany in South London as a partner on this project, who provided the venue for our first goes in the form of ‘work in progress’ concerts. It goes without saying how valuable this platform was and how having the opportunity to test things out was so important to our process. Until you perform the material you don't really get an idea of how genuine it feels or whether the pacing is wrong or how an audience will react.

Our test audiences came as part of CLS’s Comfortable Classical relaxed concert series which tends to attract an audience which includes people on a work lunch break, babies and toddlers, older people, and people with varying additional needs. We were able to test the material, gain some valuable feedback and continue to develop the piece with confidence and a renewed energy.

Pieces of music such as the oboe solo in Swan Lake began to emerge as a platform to explore our characters further. We explored beehives, battles and quiet story times. I should mention at this point I say ‘story times’ but we decided right at the start that we wanted our woodland world to be only full of music and no words. As we explored this silent approach it became apparent that it opened up a flexible narrative, where the audience had more control over the interpretation of the story and how they fitted into it. I never felt silenced and in many ways I felt even more closely linked to our audiences through this non-verbal way of sharing. It helped me feel as though we are all equals when in The Maple Tree world, from professional musicians to tiny babies to great-grandparents.

After successfully honing the piece in London (which took a while due to various Covid-19 lockdowns!) we then took The Maple Tree to Britten Pears Arts at Snape Malting's in Suffolk. Here we had a chance to use more lightning and the bigger space for movement, singing and acting. It felt good to meet a new audience and see how much they enjoyed it.

But we weren’t stopping there! We wanted to grow the idea even further and bring more characters into this musical world. Luckily Orchestras Live gave us the opportunity to expand the piece up to orchestral force levels for two performances at Colchester Arts Centre. 13 players (a whole orchestra!) were going to meet under that tree.

As our colleagues joined us, we realised that they were keen to have very distinct characters too and once again the material had a growth spurt. What became clear very quickly was that everyone believed in the stories, the music and this world that we had created. Although we were all acting it didn't feel like acting because we were genuinely enjoying being in The Maple Tree’s forest and sharing that musical world with our audience. Scary horned beasts in the shadows of the forest began to emerge and a brave flute fawn began to lead the new players. Spiders spun webs with the harp and a woodland party was had by all.

I hope we get to tour the show. Do come if we bring it near to you. I'm sure it will keep growing.