Fruit Market Music

Shenton Primary, Leicester

April 2007

A collaboration with Francis O’Donnell Smith.

As part of a proposed sound installation for Leicester’s fruit and vegetable market, we devised a series of one-day workshops that involved creating and performing music from graphic notation. Morning sessions included listening exercises and developing simple vocal and instrumental phrases with a variety of percussion instruments. In the afternoons, a large grid was marked out, with each square representing a market stall. A child with an instrument occupied each square, whilst a variable number of ‘conductors’ used a graphic shopping list to move about the space, activating and recording the musicians as they went. The children then created variations in the list to affect volume, dynamics and duration and were asked to evaluate the final results.