Music / choir
South West Open Youth Orchestra, The Lantern
South West Open Youth Orchestra or SWOYO fearlessly unite digital and analogue instruments as well as a range of styles and methods of playing to produce expansive and cinematic pieces of music. Musical tribe aside, it’s hard not to enjoy their brand of contemporary classical. Their style isn’t the only uniting force – the ‘Open’ denotes the fact that they are led by musicians with disabilities and open to all.
The first piece, Michael Nyman’s The Garden Is Becoming a Robe Room is rendered with gliding strings provided by Bradley Warwick and George Roberts on clarion, Lizzie O’Brien and Edward Miller on violin, and Ben Pollard on the LinnStrument. The clarion and the LinnStrument are instruments right at the forefront of accessible music technology. The Clarion is played using movements of the head or eyes and the LinnStrument can be played by a light press. The dynamics achieved are really incredible and certainly rival that of their analogue sisters. This is of course in part down to the fantastic musicianship of people playing them. The Clarion was actually developed by the charity OpenUp Music who also originated SWOYO.
The highlight of the performance is definitely Bristol composer Liam Taylor-West’s piece, The Umbrella, the heartbeat of which is provided by pianists Ashleigh Turley and Connor Lee alongside Ben Evans on Vibraphone. From this core rhythm, the Orchestra take you on a journey of such movement you can’t help but visualise cinematic interpretations of motion and migration. The conductor guiding the performance is Doug Bott who is Musical Director at OpenUp Music.
is needed now More than ever
The final two pieces, City Bridges and City Lights composed by Dr Liz Lane are led and then accompanied by Bristol Youth Choir respectively. The Choir and Orchestra worked seamlessly together to deliver the pieces perfectly. For me, the lyrics are too childish and simple and slightly undermine the performance, that said, sonically both pieces were fantastic.
SWOYO provide a real flick-of-the-Vs at tokenism and the exclusionary practices rife in the arts. These young musicians are pulling us into the future of music in a practical, technological and social sense and they do it with such finesse.
September 2018 will see SWOYO relaunched as the National Open Youth Orchestra – they will be the world’s first disabled lead youth orchestra
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