We are excited to announce that we’ll be exhibiting at this year’s Showman’s Show at Newbury Showground, where you can ask us all your questions about Play The Rig.

On Wednesday 13th May 2015 we were lucky enough to go to BBC Ten Pieces Live at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank to hear the BBC Concert Orchestra perform the Ten Pieces of music that formed this project. It was such a brilliant event, with the hall packed full of excited children that couldn’t wait to hear the music. Their enthusiasm and excitement was palatable and I loved how they started clapping when the pre performance music came on. You’d never find an adult doing that, spontaneously clapping along to the intro music, just because if felt good to, in a hall full of other adults!

The children had their excitement rewarded as we were taught how to sing Zadok The Priest by some of the BBC Singers, led by Rebecca (a wonderfully enthusiastic lady who I’ve been lucky enough to do workshops with before) and later on taught some of the body percussion parts to the Anna Meridith body percussion composition, Connect It. With these two audience interaction pieces interspersing the rest of the pieces, the children were enraptured by watching a live orchestra play and feeling a little bit emotional it bought a tear to my eye seeing their joy, and goosebumps on my body hearing the whole of the hall (about 2,000 people) singing Zadok The Priest with an live orchestra.

What a day! As some of you might know, the inspiration lady who was leading this project, Katy Jones, sadly died a few weeks ago. I couldn’t help observe what a wonderful legacy she has left. Lucky children.

We spent a wonderful 2 days at Plumcroft School where we worked with lots of wonderful children and made a video to prove it!

They have put it up on their website with a lovely description of our time together…

http://www.plumcroftprimary.co.uk/news/?pid=3&nid=1&storyid=11

What an exciting adventure we’ve just had!

Funded by the generous people at Arts Council England, we have visited 10 schools across South London over the last 6 weeks and conducted wacky musical workshops based around the fabulous BBC’s Ten Pieces project that aims to encourage a generation of children to get creative with classical music. We took 5 of the published Ten Pieces and together learnt about their composers, instruments, melodies, rhythms and fun facts!

Team Rig having all the blurry fun

We used our Bells Mini Rig to play the tunes of Grieg’s ‘In the hall of the mountain king’; Beethoven’s ‘Fifth Symphony’ and Mozart’s ‘Horn Concerto No.4’; we used our improved Rhythm Mini Rig to improvise storm sounds like in Britten’s ‘Storm from Peter Grimes’; we learnt facts about all 5 pieces by playing games using our bespoke playing cards; we learnt the scary and thrilling stories of Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird’ and the Grieg by playing a quiz; and we heard the beautiful melody of the Stravinsky through our *NEW* Music Box Mini Rig which has 1940’s car horn ear trumpets at each end…..and all of this in an hour…. pheeeew!!

Our new and improved Rhythm Rig!

Filming the music box Rig

But that’s not all… our website now has 3 more ‘How To…’ video guides for everyone to watch and you can see a video that shows us leading the workshops in Plumstead School! Even if you didn’t participate in the workshops, have a look and try making yourself an instrument at home – what about a home made Hosepipe Horn?!

Here is our video taken at Plumcroft primary school of us running our workshops…

How lucky we are here at The Rig!

Last week we met the wonderful Dr Mark Richards – head of Physics outreach at Imperial College London.

As part of our grant from Arts Council England, we wanted to increase our knowledge in regards to sound waves and the conduction of sound and have an expert look at some of our designs.

We spent a marvellous and informative 3 hours with Dr Richards who inspired us with his extensive knowledge on the subject. If only all Physics teachers were as handsome and charismatic, we may have signed up for science sooner!

Prior to this, we had taken a trip to the Science Museum to gain inspiration from the experiments in their Launch Pad learning zone for children. We found a sound experiment very similar to our Oven Tray Headphones that uses a piece of copper rod connected to music that you clenched your teeth around to hear the music through bone conduction.

Sound experiments at The Science Museum, London

Copper/sound experiment

Copper sound experiments at The Science Museum

So now, fellow Riggy Wiggers – we’re all scienced up, and can tell you all about the waves created by our Water Gongs or why the copper tube conducts the sound in our Music Box Mini Rig!

Here at The Rig we are constantly looking for new ideas and new ways to make music. For one of our latest projects we are turning hosepipes into French Horns.

Here is one of Becky’s friends, street performer Pete Dobbing, playing one of these in his street show during Edinburgh Festival 2014.