Our Seventeenth Year
by Alma Orr-Ewing, Course Leader 2024
Magdalen Farm Strings 2024 was a huge success, fun and inspiring for participants and staff alike. The overarching musical theme of this year was dance music. The participants learnt sections of Florence Price’s Juba Dance by ear and used this as their inspiration to compose their own dance pieces, including a tango, a waltz, a Klezmer piece, and Oak dorm’s “Fudge” (funk meets folk) dance. This culminated in one big piece, aptly titled Magdaluba Dance, which the participants performed all together in the concert – without a music stand or piece of sheet music in sight! A very special experience for young musicians to perform a piece of music that they have created together. The dance theme was complimented with pulse and time signature work in daily Dalcroze Eurythmics sessions, and by happy coincidence the younger Lightning Orchestra learnt three dance pieces during the week.
The older Thunder Orchestra were challenged with the two middle movements of John Rutter’s ‘Suite for Strings’. They worked on subdividing the beat to stay in time, listening carefully to the inner parts, and how to change the type of sound they make when they have accompanying parts as opposed to solo parts. All six chamber groups worked incredibly hard during the week and performed convincingly in the concert, from the youngest participants who have never experienced chamber music before, to the more experienced groups who rose to the challenge of playing some seriously advanced music by composers such as Dvorak and Dittersdorf.
We were incredibly lucky to have two more songs written for the choir by our patron Colin Matthews, this year using the words of Benjamin Zephaniah. As ever, Colin’s clever setting of music to the words made the songs fun to sing and listen to. The choir also learnt a tricky four-part folk song, a challenge that came across beautifully in the concert.
The evening activities this year were also a great success, kicking off with Dani Blanco coming to do a slapstick comedy improvisation workshop with hats. This workshop had participants and staff laughing from the very beginning and showed us a whole new way of approaching composition and musical notation. The folk duo Good Habits did a folk workshop, teaching us a tune that Pete wrote specially for MFS with its own Magdalen inspired lyrics, including a ‘cow that juggles’, ‘a goat that yodels’ and a ‘pig in sandals’. At the end of the evening there was a dance session, with half the participants playing the folk song and the other half dancing. The third evening activity was a masterclass evening, split into senior and junior masterclass. The senior masterclass had 4 participants perform a piece that they had prepared in advance, after which they each got constructive feedback from the audience and a mini lesson with Alma. The overwhelming support from the participants in the audience for their peers performing was heartwarming. The junior masterclass, run by Polly, had participants perform anything they wanted for each other, and then had informal chats about performing in general, with a few jokes thrown in there.
Although the weather was a bit grim towards the beginning of the week, the participants still managed to enjoy themselves on the farm and get suitably muddy (despite the mudslide being out of action this year). Afternoon activities included orienteering, an egg drop challenge, and den building and capture the flag in the woods.
A favourite element of MFS is the talent show, and this year certainly did not disappoint. A group of older participants put together such an impressive and entertaining performance of a string quintet piece named ‘Plink Plank Plunk’ that it had to be included in the final concert. There were also a few solo performances, some sibling double acts, and a brilliant (and slightly emotional) MFS version of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, telling us that ‘Magdalen matters to me’.
Alma
