This year, we took Spitalfields Music Festival to local schools in East London. Read on to find out more about our 2024 Festival project.
A bit of background...
The Cries of London project was part of our year-round Neighbourhood Schools programme, where we create bespoke projects in partnership with East London schools to engage students with musical experiences which inspire and enable cultural learning.
Our specialism is singing, creative composition and songwriting, which means the work we do requires no previous musical experience. We encourage children to be creative, drawing from their own experience to create songs, themes and lyrics.
Cries of London: Neighbourhood Schools
The Cries of London have echoed around London’s streets for centuries, as street traders sold their wares and enticed passers-by to come and buy whatever they might have for sale. First documented in medieval times, each street trader would have their own distinctive cry, or recurring phrase, which eventually through repeated use, acquired a musical quality. Different eras of history had their own slightly different iteration of the ‘cries’. You can still see the influence of the cries in modern-day catchy advertising jingles on the radio, TV or social media, which seep subconsciously into the brain, only to re-emerge unbidden in the middle of the night!
At Spitalfields Music Festival 2024, The Carice Singers performed Luciano Berio’s 1974 work ‘Cries of London’ and we wanted to introduce our Neighbourhood Schools students to this fascinating topic, which links into many different part of the school curriculum: history (as the East End has always played a very significant role in this aspect of history), music (thinking about what modern-day ‘cries’ might sound like), and art (creating modern-day art based on Wheatley’s famous Cries of London portraits from the 1790s which provided a rare glimpse into the lives of everyday London people).
Key stage 2 children and their teachers worked with experienced workshop leaders Jessie Maryon Davies and Gawain Hewitt on this project.
Students collaborated with Jessie and Gawain over five sessions to compose new modern-day iterations of the ‘Cries of London’. They worked in small groups to explore what the modern-day Cries of London might look like – deciding on a product they would like to sell, how they would go about selling it and how they would create their own ‘jingle’ or ‘cry’ to advertise their wares. As individuals and in small groups, they then co-composed, performed and recorded their new pieces with Jessie providing backing accompaniment on the piano.
Students also worked with sound and visual artist Gawain Hewitt to create a market stall…but no ordinary one! This market stall was made up of children’s portraits, plus sound installations made from wooden fruit and vegetables: each interactive piece of fruit or vegetable would play one of the musical ‘Cries’ composed by the children, looped over and over again.
The ‘market stall’ was transported to the Carice Singers performance of the Cries of London on 2nd July by the children, who got to set it up in-situ, and it was then explored by the audience before and after the pre-concert talk and evening concert.
“What was your favourite thing about the project?”
“I loved seeing the market stall in a professional concert venue, and our work ready to be explored by lots of people”
“I liked recording the cries with Gawain’s sound equipment”
“When we had to think of modern-day Cries…did somebody say…Just Eat!”