Posted 19 December 2019

For the past 3 years Wakefield College have taken 2^nd Year music performers to see a live orchestra at Huddersfield Town Hall with the support of funding by Go Higher West Yorkshire, with the trip forming part of their introduction to film music. As the film and TV industry has been vastly growing over the last decade with the introduction of Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube Originals and the standard Hollywood blockbuster, the demand for musicians who specialise in this area has grown immensely. For 90% of the students, this is their first experience of a spectacle such as this. I have had students say how much it ‘changed their perspective of music’ and ‘how inspirational it was to see performers so skilled’. Students have also been able to identify instrumentation they have never seen and then use said sounds in their compositions, producing music they wouldn’t have been able to compose without this experience.

From our last outing to the Orchestra, there were even some opportunities from the stage tech crew to get involved. The crew spoke a little about how their job role supports the live music industry and the skills and qualifications that they have to enable them to fulfil their role. This trip has now become a vital part of teaching as part of the Film Music unit, enabling students to experience a particularly important orchestra, with it being local and almost on their doorstep. It has even inspired Wakefield College students to listen to more of this type of music which scientifically has had major beneficial impacts on the brain.