Orchestra ONE: Project 23 – Gaming and Technology aka. Orchestra ONE Hero!

During the summer holidays, our Orchestra ONE players came together for four days at Maidstone Grammar School to create a fantastic original composition, based on the theme of Gaming and Technology. Our regular members were delighted to see the return of Musical Director, Joe Browne, and under his guidance they created a musical representation of a computer game, complete with different musical worlds and levels, all moving towards the defeat of the final evil boss to become the ultimate Orchestra ONE hero!

The piece started with an unorthodox introduction where two young performed “played” a giant controller to direct which musical themes should be played and in what order. This was an entirely improvised choice, so our musicians had to be on the ball and ready to play any of their composed themes in any order! This was followed by a totally unique performance of the Tetris game theme with a ska twist, before our players explored their newly created musical levels. Each level covered a different world, from Pompeii to Pirates, Victorian England to Japanese Garden, and the final battle taking place in Egypt.

Our young people were joined by the familiar faces of our now well-established tutor team, along with some new additions. In recent projects, Kate Harwood has done a marvellous job of managing both the keys and vocal sections – no easy task! For this project, however, we separated the two sections and had vocal tutor Danny Moulton joining us. Our vocalists created a brilliant song as part of their Pirate world which, along with accompaniment from our more experienced strings, brass and woodwind players, proved to be one of the audience favourites of the whole performance.

The final section set in Egypt brought the piece to a spectacular close, with a beautiful solo from talented flautist, Ricky, and a truly groovy double bass riff led by O1 newcomer, Noah. The theme of Gaming and Technology wouldn’t have been complete without tutor Luke Crook bringing along his cornucopia of music tech gadgets and gizmos, and the collection of samples and timbres used really helped to create the feeling of being in a live computer game.

A huge thanks to our wonderful tutors, expert technicians, superb supervisors and to all our of incredible young people for making Project 23 one of the best O1 projects yet! Bring on Project 24!