Music KS3 / GCSE: Dev Griffin on 'HandsFree' by Anna Meredith

DEV:'Who's making that music?'

DEV:It's you and me.

DEV:Because music's something we can all get stuck into.

DEV:I mean, we are instruments.

DEV:We can clap, we can click, we can pat and we can stamp.

DEV:Anyone can have a go at making this kind of body percussion. Have you ever tried beatboxing? It's a way of making percussion noises using your mouth and voice.

BEATBOXING

DEV:Who'd have thought you could make so much music just using your own body.

DEV:'Well, this lot for a start.'

DEV:'The whole orchestra putting down their flutes, tubas, clarinets, drums, everything, and using their body parts to create a world of sound.

DEV:You're probably used to clapping at the end of music but with this piece you can join in right from the start.

CLAPPING

DEV:That rhythm sounds to me like hundreds of teeth chomping down on crisps. Or a giant buildings shooting up out of the ground, brick by brick.

DEV:This is Anna Meredith, she's the one who composed this amazing piece of music. Can you tell us how you came up with the idea?

ANNA:So this piece is commissioned by the National Youth Orchestra which is an orchestra made up entirely of teenagers aged between 12 and 18.

ANNA:And they wanted a piece of music which would explore all the other kinds of musicianship they could do. So it was basically using everything apart from their instruments.

DEV:How did you come up with the name?

1900:02:29:23 00:02:39:06ANNA:So I guess the word handsfree implies that you've got your hands spare, because they put down their instruments and then they do other stuff. Movement, body percussion, which is all using their hands.

DEV:If you think that orchestral music is just about violins and trombones then think again. The music that orchestras make is always changing and always full of surprises. Like this.

DEV:'Without the body percussion suddenly I feel like I'm floating in the night. But our voices are incredible things, and suddenly, it's all change.'

DEV:'What does this remind you of?'

DEV:To me, the whole orchestra sounds like an engine now.

DEV:'The orchestra even starts to look like a machine. Can you see the incredible shapes the music is making?'

DEV:So I can hear biting and breathing and tapping and all sorts in this piece of music. Was that the intention?

ANNA:I think the idea with this piece is that you can hear whatever you want in it. Your ears are your own and you can take your own journey through the piece.

DEV:Why is it important to listen to classical music?

ANNA:I think there's something really special about the sounds of these instruments which have developed over hundreds of years and make such unique sound when you actually watch them being played.

ANNA:And also, I think, just to be able to have music that's been written today by real life composers is really exciting, because it's this brand new fresh music written by people who are living in the same world as you, and that’s a really exciting thing.

DEV:How did you get into classical music?

ANNA:I didn’t really know that composers existed. I knew that traditionally Beethoven and Mozart were composers, but I didn’t know that's something that people did as a current job.

ANNA:I got into music, eventually, by playing recorder and clarinet and drums while I was at school and then gradually I just wanted to get a bit more involved myself, start to make music as well as play other people's. And it started to grow from there.

DEV:Handsfree reminds me that even though there's a lot of music out there with all sorts of names - dance, classical, pop - in the end all music has one thing in common, it comes from inside us. Which means nothing can stop you from making it. So why not get started right now?