Kids’ Choir

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  Photo: Michael Walter

To celebrate the 10^th year of Kids’ Choir, the Thames Festival Trust has commissioned award-winning singer-songwriter Sam Lee to write and arrange a new song cycle for 2012. This new work will be written specifically for young voices and include up to four parts. It will be performed by over 600 primary school children in a forty-minute outdoor concert overlooking the river Thames

The song cycle will draw upon traditional repertoires, both ancient and modern, featuring soundscapes set upon a musical tide of historical and contemporary London and its river.

Working in collaboration with the Royal College of Music's Junior Department and the Junk Orchestra, the instrumentation and arrangement of this traditional material will be given a contemporary twist using unique and individual instruments, from sliding plastic pipe trombones and scaffold xylophones to the haunting sounds of the trampoline reverb tubes, to recreate the magical sounds of the river.

Song for the Thames Silkie will receive its premiere performance at 1pm on Sunday 9 September, when it will be performed by over 600 London primary school children on the south bank of the River Thames, in the amphitheatre outside City Hall. Kids' Choir is a free concert and a key element of the Thames Festival programme, and will be attended by over 2,000 audience members. Kids' Choir will form part of a programme of music and choral works in The Scoop at More London throughout the festival weekend.

While over 600 children will take part in the Thames Festival performance, the majority of participating schools (40) will also use the repertoire for their end of term concerts.

“Having spent many years studying the rich musical seam of folk songs associated with the London and the Thames, it is really exciting to be creating a new work based upon these timeless themes and melodies and giving them new life through young voices. The Silkie tale also holds a special pertinence for me having learned the ancient ballad from the late and great Traveller singer and storyteller Stanley Robertson. This is an opportunity to see this wonderful tale take flight and be reborn in a local landscape and inspire another generation with the power of these ancient tales, revealing how important the lore they carry still is within contemporary society”. Sam Lee

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