Music for 111 Musicians

Take One Piece – Music for 111 Musicians’ was a creative unit of work inspired by Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and although our emphasis was very much on process rather than product, we did have an end goal to produce a new composition for World Music Day. 

The structure of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians is based on a cycle of 11 chords played at the very beginning of the piece and repeated at the end. All the instruments and voices play or sing pulsing notes within each chord.  Throughout the piece there is use of repeating patterns to create layers of sound.  These repeating patterns develop and change as they move towards a new motif.

Young musicians listened to the piece and talked about it.  We identified the use of repetitive patterns and began to explore patterns in the world around us – in everyday sounds we hear, what we can see in nature, buildings, etc.  We collected a visual and audio resource bank and then asked the question – what would these patterns sound like?  We worked with our young musicians to explore instruments, including our voices, to create sounds of what we see around us.  

Music leaders worked online and in person with their groups (coming out of the pandemic lockdown) to produce individual responses to the Reich piece.  Each school’s response was celebrated individually and then these responses were brought together to create a new piece which we called Music for 111 Musicians, as 111 children and young people participated in the project.  The collaborative composition ‘Music for 111 Musicians’ was launched and premiered, via YouTube on World Music Day.