Orchestra ONE Project 38: Emotions

October half term 2025 saw the return of Orchestra ONE at Highworth Grammar School and, this time, we got all emotional!

As suggested by previous participants, our theme for Project 38 was ‘Emotions’. Led by musical director, Joe Browne, our participants considered how different emotions might be represented musically. After identifying as many different emotions as they could think of (‘ennui’ was a very popular suggestion amongst our teenage participants!), our young musicians selected a couple of their favourite emotions to focus on and then worked in their instrument sections to create short musical ideas reflecting these. Supported by their section tutors, these ideas were then shared and further developed with the full ensemble.

Over the four-day course, these ideas were shaped into the final piece which was then performed to friends and family on the final afternoon of the course – in true O1 style, most of us were left with catchy earworms stuck in our brains were several days afterwards!

This O1 course was also an opportunity for us to try out some new ideas and challenges – on the second day of the course, our participants tried out a completely youth-led composing session – with our section tutors joining as participants as well! Jack, Lily and Juno took on the roles of section leaders, and guided their own groups in creating completely new compositions, with little (if any!) ideas coming from the tutors. This task was very challenging for our young people but very well received and is something we will be exploring further in future projects.

In addition to their composing, our participants also took part in youth voice discussions. Guided by Lindsay Edmondson, these discussions provided hugely valuable feedback about O1 projects and ideas for future development and progression – we are incredibly grateful to our youngsters for sharing their thoughts and ideas and we’ll be working on incorporating many of these over the next few projects, so watch this space!

As always, all of our participants were fantastic throughout this O1 course – thank you to all of them for their hard work throughout the week. Thank you to our tutors and pastoral support team for another superb project, and to Highworth Grammar School for hosting us.

We must also say an additional thank you and well done to our participant, Jack – having attended his very first Orchestra ONE project back in April 2019, Jack has been a dedicated member of the O1 family ever since. Project 38 was his final project as a participant, and we wish him all the best for the future – perhaps we’ll see him back as a tutor or sound engineer one day?!

You can watch the project video below – enjoy this stunning composition! (Watch out folks, it’s about to get emotional…)

Sami Mason

Orchestra ONE Manager