Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
Located in Australia
- Luke Styles
Friday Afternoon Songs (2016)
- Wise Music G. Schirmer Australia Pty Ltd (World)
- piano
- treble choir (young voices, 8 to 18-year-olds)
- 33 min
Programme Note
These Friday Afternoon Songs have enabled me to embrace the fun, nonsense, humour, darkness and playfulness of a young person's fantasy world. One takes the everyday of homework and turns it into a parade of monsters while others investigate and poke fun at annual celebrations of Valentines and Easter.
Young voices have an immediacy to them that we as adults can't help but be drawn in by. When this is coupled with fantastical story telling through song, young people can make the absurd believable and both the ludicrous and banal exciting.
I have worked closely with the writer Alan McKendrick on this approach and he has created texts which facilitate the flights of fancy of both my own musical imagination and the young people's. I have consciously reflected on Britten's set of Friday Afternoons songs and included in my set two rounds and a number of technical procedures that work so well for young singers (and old ones too) in Britten's set of songs. It has been an immense pleasure to compose this set of songs, to work with fantastic professional artists and a host of enthusiastic and inspiring young people.
Young voices have an immediacy to them that we as adults can't help but be drawn in by. When this is coupled with fantastical story telling through song, young people can make the absurd believable and both the ludicrous and banal exciting.
I have worked closely with the writer Alan McKendrick on this approach and he has created texts which facilitate the flights of fancy of both my own musical imagination and the young people's. I have consciously reflected on Britten's set of Friday Afternoons songs and included in my set two rounds and a number of technical procedures that work so well for young singers (and old ones too) in Britten's set of songs. It has been an immense pleasure to compose this set of songs, to work with fantastic professional artists and a host of enthusiastic and inspiring young people.
