Education

All the music commissions are excellent vehicles for educational and outreach projects and many have teacher's packs available which complement performances of the works. Please refer to the page on each spearate commission for precise details of what is available.

The two operas, The Golden Ticket and Fantastic Mr. Fox are closely-based on the original Dahl stories and as such have the potential to attract a younger audience than one might normally expect to enjoy a contemporary opera. The Dahl books have helped countless teachers advance their pupils' reading studies, while the commissions also offer many opportunities for school-based activities which explore the way words and music can be interwoven to tell a story.

In many of the commissions, individual instruments represent specific characters or situations, while characters sometimes have their own leitmotifs and rhythmic patterns. Scenes and events are sometimes evoked by use of particular instruments played in particular ways. Through listening to these new commissions, a child can readily come to an appreciation of quite sophisticated issues of orchestration, colour and musical structure.

Large-scale eductational projects, based around these commissions, have now been successfully undertaken all over the UK and Europe, and also in Japan, Philippines, Hong Kong, USA and South Africa.