The London Philharmonic Orchestra commissioned me to write a short piece and a children’s song for their BrightSparks Concert, an educational concert aimed at children aged 7-11. The concert was themed around different types of dance, so I wrote a piece that took the form and characters of a Baroque dance suite [Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Gigue], and chopped them up and condensed them into a three and a half minutes. The result is a piece that moves between brass fanfares, woodwind flourishes and jagged string melodies, before the echoes and fragments of a final jig enter towards the end.
The kids who came to the concert also spent a couple of weeks learning my song “Dance the World Over!”, which is all about the different kinds of dance to suit different moods and times. They had a lot of fun moving and singing to the music!
Peter Yarde Martin 