Educational Workshops and Exhibitions

Jan Wild's Bluebeard paintings

In January 2005 Julie invited twenty talented women writers to attend a workshop in the Director’s Lounge at Symphony Hall, to tour the building, to look behind the doors and to respond to the music of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. Over the next two years with support from Poetry Central, workshops, readings and exhibitions inspired by this work were held at Symphony Hall and were toured in arts venues and literary festivals in the Midlands area. Jan Wild’s Bluebeard paintings continue to be exhibited at the Repertory Theatre to date. More information about this project and examples of poetry are available in the Publications section and on Julie’s website

During autumn 2005 Julie ran a series of workshops on the theme ‘Around the World’ in Birmingham, Solihull and Coventry schools. They created poetry that was integrated into a new composition commissioned by Andrew Downes. The poems were set to music in Songs of the Skies, which was sponsored by British Airways and performed at Symphony Hall.

In February 2006 Julie invited the poet David Hart to respond to Debussy’s La Mer and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde performed at Symphony Hall by the CBSO and conducted by Sakari Oramo. His exhibition of poetry and photographs, The Sea and the Earth, the Earth and the Sea was exhibited on Symphony Hall’s Level 4 foyer and was later shown at Aldeburgh Festival. A small extract from the exhibition was included in the CBSO concert programme on the evening of the performance:

The hill told me it didn’t want to be a hill
any more, had had enough of
being a hill. I said I
understood, you don’t have to explain.

And we chatted like this for a while
and there was sadness in the air, in the hill’s air
and my own. I walked about the hill sadly

for several hours, the hill crying its silence
to me, and I drank my coffee
and ate my sandwiches
and came home again and wept.

There is a slow, mute wind
wanting to know our business, remember,
and being so bound
and without redress we float, remember
and wait.

Voice of the salt heart
from inside the walk away comes back out to
meet the sunrise
and there is an eye in it,
a knowing eye.

The sea makes love to the earth,
the earth burns under the sea,
it was always this way, and will be.

This way and will be inevitably
raw and perfect, perfected and mute,
ask any beach, any spray.

David Hart

In August 2005 students on the NAGTY summer school at Warwick University, led by Peter Blegvad, came with Julie to write Symphony Hall into words. In the last two years, inspired by her work at THSH, Julie has run workshops on the relationship between Poetry and Music at universities and arts venues at home and abroad. In September 2008 she ran the Synthesising Sound workshop at Arts at the Barn with Gabrielle Byam-Grounds (Director of English Serenata) [you can download more information about Synthesising Sound below]. Most recently, August 2009, she led a workshop on poetry and music for students at the IGGY summer school at Warwick University. Julie’s educational outreach work will continue with a Piano Room workshop in the autumn.