What an amazing concert yesterday to end such a Christmassy week for MfE! A great big WELL DONE to all the singers in Vocals and Nottingham Community Voices for a great performance and a special thank you to Santa for taking the time to drop by.


We have been getting into the festive spirit with this great playlist of classical Christmas favourites – perfect for tree decorating, present wrapping and anything else that requires an alternative to Chris Rea!

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/occasions/christmas/best-festive-classical-music/


  • There are still a few places left for Blow The Dust Off Your Instrument! If you are looking at that cello in the attic, clarinet in the garage or trumpet in shed (don’t keep trumpets in sheds please) you have just a few days left to sign up for our 7th January BTD! All the info and how to book online is here: https://www.music-for-everyone.org/event/blow-the-dust-off-your-instrument-3/

Stay warm and have a great week!

Your friends at MfE.

12/12/2022

admin@music-for-everyone.org

www.music-for-everyone.org | 0115 9589312

10 Goose Gate | Hockley | NG1 1FF

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#MfEMondays are Music for Everyone’s weekly emails designed to keep you up to date with MfE events & to circulate interesting finds, special features, and motivational moments for your Mondays! We are aiming to send out something new each week.

November is just around the corner, that must mean that MfE Christmas and 2023 events are now open for booking!

Concerts

Nottingham Chamber Singers present A Mystical Christmas at 3.30pm on Sunday 4th December at St Mary the Virgin Church in Bunny.

Christmas is Coming! On Sunday 11th December, members of the MfE ‘singing family’ come together for MfE’s annual Christmas concert at the Albert Hall, Nottingham, featuring a special appearance from Father Christmas! Children tickets are just £5 each.

Further details and ticket booking link for concerts can be found here: https://www.music-for-everyone.org/whats-on/concerts/

Workshops/Courses

Christmas Vocals – open to all primary aged singers, a singing afternoon on Saturday 10th December, then join the Christmas is Coming concert to perform on Sunday 11th December! https://www.music-for-everyone.org/event/vocals-christmas-is-coming/

Nottingham Community Voices – Christmas. Members of Daytime Voices and Community Voices are invited to join Vocals on Sunday 11th December at the Albert Hall, Nottingham for MfE’s annual Christmas concert. Optional rehearsals from 28th November, https://www.music-for-everyone.org/event/christmas-is-coming-daytime-voices/

Blow the Dust off your Instrument Saturday 7th January 2023

https://www.music-for-everyone.org/event/blow-the-dust-off-your-instrument-3/

Nottingham Festival Chorus workshop weekend and concert 28/29 January & 4 February 2023

https://www.music-for-everyone.org/event/nfc-course-weekend/


The Nottingham Festival Chorus will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams in their next event, a singing weekend course and concert in January/February 2023, performing the stunning work Toward the Unknown Region.

The anniversary itself is being commemorated and celebrated throughout 2022 (our celebration comes a little later than the actual anniversary!) with October being the anniversary of his birth.

A champion of music-making in the community, he was a central figure to British musical life. His work The Lark Ascending is regularly voted the UK’s favourite classical work, and he was well known for writing for most major forms of genre in music, including film and stage.

Have a listen to brighten a rainy Monday to The Lark Ascending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR2JlDnT2l8


  • Bake Off fever has hit the office again, we’ve been enjoying some musical puns linked to baking – this one in particular made us giggle!


Have a good week!

Your friends at MfE.

24/10/2022

admin@music-for-everyone.org

www.music-for-everyone.org | 0115 9589312

10 Goose Gate | Hockley | NG1 1FF

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We had a great 3 days of music making at Summer School last week. You can find out what we got up and see pictures of the sessions and amazing guests we had on our blog page, there is a post for each day of Summer School: https://www.music-for-everyone.org/about-us/blog/

Announcing 2022/23 dates!

Details of courses, workshops and concerts are now available on our website for the 40th Anniversary season. Information for regular groups (Daytime groups, etc) will follow soon including advance booking.


The rain has finally arrived, bringing some much needed freshness to the air after the most recent heatwave. We decided to look at music inspired by rain, hoping a rain-dance would open the heavens sooner than expected!

Chopin’s Prelude Op.28 (‘Raindrop’) with it’s repetitive pulse through the texture is thought to sound like raindrops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVau-JRGirg

An appropriately named piece The Welcome Arrival of Rain by Judith Weir, inspired by verse from the Hindu text ‘Bhagavata Purana’ – catching the sense of sudden rain and the renewal and growth that follows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU4PBYjDtkw

And something a little different to finish, here is a choir making the sounds of a rain storm using their hands and feet, impressive! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29qaN0M0o0s



Have a good week!

Your friends at MfE.

15/08/2022

admin@music-for-everyone.org

www.music-for-everyone.org | 0115 9589312

10 Goose Gate | Hockley | NG1 1FF

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#MfEMondays are Music for Everyone’s weekly emails designed to keep you up to date with MfE events & to circulate interesting finds, special features, and motivational moments for your Mondays! We are aiming to send out something new each week.

Greetings after yet another wonderful weekend of MfE music-making!

Saturday and Sunday saw the massed forces of the Nottingham Community Voices (featuring singers from our various daytime voices groups plus members from the Lunchtime Voices, Nottingham Chamber Singers and various other community choirs around the county), combining in a truly stunning ‘chorus line’ for our West End to Broadway musicals course.

Our singers worked hard on their renditions of the romantic and sumptuous scores of My Fair Lady and The King and I, along with smooth and sensual excerpts by the legendary Irving Berlin, before rounding it all off with their riotous rabble of revolutionaries in Les Miserables! They were accompanied by the stunning Nottingham Concert Orchestra, who serenaded us with a string of Broadway hits, including a heart-rending suite from Bernstein’s West Side Story. It was an absolute treat. Adding a little extra shimmer and sparkle to all of this, were the fantastic talents of Simon Theobald and Kate Taylor, whose performances left us simultaneously rolling in the aisles and weeping into our programmes. It was a triumph – huge congratulations to everyone involved!

   

Our Vocals weekend is next. With expert tuition from Alison Bennett and Rachel Parkes, this is an absolute steal at only £15.00 for the entire event (two workshop afternoons and a concert afternoon). Please tell all the young people (of primary school age) in your lives that it will be a wonderful chance to learn some new and entertaining music, as well as some well-known Disney tunes from Moana. These massed musical events tend to be formative in our experiences and memories, so help us to spread the word. We know you will want to come and support them in their concert on Saturday 21st May – tickets are available on our website.

Finally for those instrumentalists amongst you, our Summer Blow the Dust day is fast approaching. Tell your friends, or even bring someone along from out of town … it’s a wonderful day to relax, enjoy and bond with other like-minded orchestral players out there! If you fancy an extended chance to waggle those clarinet keys or refine your ‘ricochet’, then our Summer School is for you. More details available at www.music-for-everyone.org


With the sun shining, our minds at MfE are turning to our Summer School. We are really looking forward to returning to Trent College and hopefully enjoying their lovely grounds in the sunshine.  If you haven’t yet decided whether to come along, let us motivate you with a few facts about Vaughan William’s, who’s music we will be exploring to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth:

  • He was well connected; His great-uncle was Charles Darwin, and ceramics magnate Josiah Wedgewood was his great-great-grandfather.
  • During the Second World War, he is rumoured to have done a stint of cleaning at the local public toilets in Dorking.
  • The composer never took his privileged background for granted and worked all his life for democratic and egalitarian ideals. He viewed music as being part of everyone’s everyday life, rather than being the preserve of an elite. Something we wholeheartedly agree with at MfE!

  • As the French Presidential Elections closed yesterday, we found it fitting that the French national anthem was composed on this day in 1792, here is Berlioz’s arrangement ‘La Marseillaise’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZWabwLPUXc

Have a good week!

Your friends at MfE.

25/04/2022

admin@music-for-everyone.org

www.music-for-everyone.org | 0115 9589312

10 Goose Gate | Hockley | NG1 1FF

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#MfEMondays are Music for Everyone’s weekly emails designed to keep you up to date with MfE events & to circulate interesting finds, special features, and motivational moments for your Mondays! We are aiming to send out something new each week.

The MfE groups are taking a well-deserved break for Easter after a busy Spring term.

While the groups are off, the artistic and office team are busy prepping for a wonderful summer term full of music – all the details can be found on our website, below is a quick overview of what is coming up!

  • Musicals course and concert – 23/24 April
  • Vocals course and concert – 14/15 & 21 May
  • Blow the Dust playing day – 11 June
  • NFC Jubilee workshop and concert – 25/26 June
  • Summer School – 8/9/10 August

https://www.music-for-everyone.org/


We’re sure you are all familiar with the traditional Easter Egg (painted/decorated/chocolate/etc!) but we’ve found out some interesting facts about the ‘other’ type of easter egg… the ones that double as secret or hidden messages in music.

One of the first composers to do this was J.S. Bach and he hid one Easter Egg so well, it wasn’t discovered for 250 years in his Mass in B
Minor
!

He would often sign his name into his music B A C H as an ‘easter egg’ (in German notation, the letter H is used for B natural, and B is used for B flat). Whether these were always intentional will never be known, but it seems to most experts that he would add them to the beginning or end of a piece as a ‘signing off’.

Do you know of any others that he hid his name in?

Bach: Mass in B Minor – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FLbiDrn8IE

And for Easter, here is Bach’s St John Passion, composed in 1724 for the Good Friday Vespers service in the same year – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMf9XDQBAaI&t=4s

Happy Easter from the MfE Team!



Have a good week!

Your friends at MfE.

11/04/2022

admin@music-for-everyone.org

www.music-for-everyone.org | 0115 9589312

10 Goose Gate | Hockley | NG1 1FF

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#MfEMondays are Music for Everyone’s weekly emails designed to keep you up to date with MfE events & to circulate interesting finds, special features, and motivational moments for your Mondays! We are aiming to send out something new each week.

MfE Review of 2020-21
Yesterday the MfE AGM took place via Zoom. The meeting ended with an entertaining review of the MfE Year 2020-21 on our YouTube channel. If you would like to watch it then please, just click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mCtQsBBvDA

It’s an enjoyable watch – get the popcorn out!

This coming Saturday afternoon, 19th March, MfE’s three youth bands have their Easter concert – Bandtastic! – at West Bridgford Methodist Church. For an afternoon of great windband music, find out more on our website! Tickets will be available on the door: https://www.music-for-everyone.org/event/youth-bandtastic/

Musicals course (Saturday 23 April) and concert (Sunday 24th April).
We are in the process of sorting out all the music for our Musicals course. If you haven’t signed up and would like to come along and sing some of the best music from well-known Musicals then it’s not too late!  Just visit our website https://www.music-for-everyone.org/event/ncm-come-and-sing/ download the attached form or give our office a ring on 0115 958 9312 – we would love to see you there.


The 75th BAFTAs took place yesterday, celebrating the best in film from the past year.

Amongst the winners were several musical films, including brand new music and the remake of a classic!

You may well have heard of new animated film Encanto (almost definitely if you have children and grandchildren!) This gets a mention regularly in our office, here’s a catchy song from the film to keep your Monday afternoon going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQwVKr8rCYw

Another big winner of the night was a story we all know well… the remake of West Side Story has received high praise and brings back those classic songs, including this one that needs no introduction! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoQEddtFN3Q



Have a good week!

Your friends at MfE.

14/03/2022

admin@music-for-everyone.org

www.music-for-everyone.org | 0115 9589312

10 Goose Gate | Hockley | NG1 1FF

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#MfEMondays are Music for Everyone’s weekly emails designed to keep you up to date with MfE events & to circulate interesting finds, special features, and motivational moments for your Mondays! We are aiming to send out something new each week.

Congratulations to all who took part in yesterday’s Christmas is Coming concert at the Albert Hall! Everyone had a great time – even Father Christmas was impressed!

*BOOKWISE* Our bookshop in Nottingham (10 Goose Gate, Hockley) is open through December for all your book-buying-last-minute-present-shopping needs, including SUNDAYS! For December only, the shop will be open on Sundays from 11am – 3pm in addition to the usual opening hours (Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 4pm)


Did you know that today is Saint Lucy’s Day?  Also called the Feast of Saint Lucy, it commemorates Lucia of Syracuse who according to legend brought food and aid to Christians hiding in the Roman catacombs, wearing a candle lit wreath on her head (do not try this at home) to light her way and leave her hands free to carry as much food as possible.

Her feast day, which coincided with the shortest day of the year prior to calendar reforms, is widely celebrated as a festival of light.  Falling within the Advent season, Saint Lucy’s Day is viewed as a precursor of Christmastide, pointing to the arrival of the Light of Christ in the calendar on Christmas Day.


  • Here are some truly awful Christmas jokes to get you in the mood for those Christmas crackers! Enjoy….

What is the Three Wise Men’s favourite Christmas Carol?
Oh Camel, ye Faithful.

What is a snowman’s favourite song?
Freeze a jolly good fellow.

Why did the choir have to cancel their carol concert?
They caught Tinselitis.

What’s the best present a musician could ever receive?
A broken drum.  You can’t beat it.

What do Baroque musicians do if they don’t like their Christmas presents?
Hand them Bach.

Why are sopranos so good at Christmas shopping?
They always manage to get descant prices.

What is a duck’s favourite Christmas Carol?
In the Beak Midwinter


Have a good week!

Your friends at MfE.

13/12/2021

admin@music-for-everyone.org

www.music-for-everyone.org | 0115 9589312

10 Goose Gate | Hockley | NG1 1FF

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#MfEMondays are Music for Everyone’s weekly emails designed to keep you up to date with MfE events & to circulate interesting finds, special features, and motivational moments for your Mondays! We are aiming to send out something new each week.

3 incredible days, 4 amazing conductors, 5 beautiful and inspiring concerts, 6 bottles of hand sanitiser, 12 pieces of music, 124 singers and instrumentalists, 184 sandwiches, 240 cocktail sausages, 425 photos and 628 cups of tea and coffee and that’s Summer School 2021!


The third and final day began with an unexpected warm up on the field for the singers when the fire alarm went off (false alarm!). After a few vocal exercises and stretches in the sunshine with Hilary, it’s back into the Chapel for performance preparation ahead of the Showcase Concert.

Meanwhile, the orchestra are settling into the Obolensky Building where the evening concert is to take place, to run through and polish their chosen performance items with Rob.
After the morning break with tea, coffee and biscuits in the sunshine, the wind band and strings focus on their pieces with Gill and Rob respectively – with some of the eager (and occasionally over-enthusiastic!) MfE team joining the percussion section for the wind band piece and Assistant Artistic Director Rachel shining on the tambourine!

Our final guest artist in the Lunchtime Recital programme is Summer School accompanist Richard Cox. We managed to coax him out from behind the choir and take us all on a whistle-stop tour of Europe with stunning performances of piano works by Bach, Dvorak, Debussy and Ravel.

The afternoon rehearsals include orchestra and choir coming together to rehearse the big finale joint item, then it’s concert time!

The Concert Programme

  • Brahms – Hungarian Rhapsody No.5 Full Orchestra
  • Trad. arr. Zimmerman – The Wellerman Choir
  • Makor – O Lux Beata Trinitas Choir
  • Mozart – Sinfonietta Strings
  • Holst – 1st Suite in Eb for Military Band Wind band
  • Pergolesi – Magnificat Choir and Strings
  • Faure – Cantique de Jean Racine Choir and Strings
  • Reed – El Camino Real Wind band
  • Hamilton – La Danza Espanol Strings
  • Strauss – Thunder and Lightning Polka Full Orchestra
  • Beethoven – Ode to Joy Combined Orchestra and Choir

An emotional end to the concert, for many, this is their first concert in well over a year, if not longer! MfE are also sad to say goodbye to Windband Animateur, Gill Henshaw, who will be leaving her role at the end of the summer to return to full-time teaching. She will be back at MfE events though, she can’t get rid of us that easy!

The performance over, it’s time to tuck into the buffet (which includes the 240 cocktail sausages!) and relax with a drink and a chat with fellow musicians and reflect on the past three days and celebrate the joyful return to music-making.

And that’s it for Summer 2021! Finally, we would just like to say a huge THANK YOU to all our guests and conductors from this week – Chris, Gill, Hilary, Rachel, Richard, Robert and Sam. This years venue, Trent College – amazing support and staff that have helped out. Also to all the singers, players and helpers that came along – thank you for continuing your support of Music for Everyone, particularly over the past eighteen months and we hope to see you all again very soon!

KEEPING IN TOUCH

Hello everyone

Have you been enjoying your new ‘freedom’ and the lovely sunshine we have all been enjoying over the past few days? Are you ready for some live music making?

Well if the answer is ‘yes’ then we have lots on offer.

Our Family Singing Workshop Afternoon on Sunday 23 May is the ideal way to get everyone singing – click here for details. https://www.music-for-everyone.org/event/family-sing-workshop

And the MfE Summer School 2021 (9 – 11 August 2021) is now open for enrolments!

Trent College, Long Eaton

The MfE Summer School is your opportunity to immerse yourself in three days of wonderful music making.  The outstanding facilities of Trent College, Long Eaton provide the perfect location for this inspiring musical experience. Workshop sessions will be led by MfE’s artistic team plus nationally recognised guest artists and conductors: Hilary Campbell, Richard Cox, Chris Swann, Sam Sweeney and Martin van der Brugge.  Click here for further details or download the attached PDF. 

https://www.music-for-everyone.org/event/summer-school-2021

As always, our website gives full details of all MfE activities.  https://www.music-for-everyone.org

With all best wishes

Angela


  • Watch this unique performance of The Swan from Carnival of the Animals… with Bill Bailey on cow bells!

Have a good week!

Your friends at MfE.

19/04/2021

admin@music-for-everyone.org

www.music-for-everyone.org | 0115 9589312

10 Goose Gate | Hockley | NG1 1FF

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#MfEMondays are Music for Everyone’s weekly emails designed to keep you up to date with MfE events & to circulate interesting finds, special features, and motivational moments for your Mondays! We are aiming to send out something new each week.

dreamstime_l_59459940-2

 

Think Broadway, think the West End, and come to a concert this Sunday, 3rd April, 3.30pm in Nottingham’s Albert Hall.

The afternoon will fizz with familiar songs and tunes from musicals and films. Your toes will be tapping to themes from James Bond and Murder on the Orient Express, songs from The King and I, Oklahoma, Carousel, a medley of Andrew Lloyd Webber numbers, and guest soloists, all accompanied by a Big Band Orchestra conducted by Angela Kay and Phil Smith.

The singers come from all over Nottinghamshire to form Music for Everyone’s Nottingham Community Choir. We would love to see you there. Click here to book your tickets for the best seats. Tickets will also be available on the door.