Music Award

sponsored by Key Strings Musical Education
Presented to the educational establishment that can demonstrate a commitment to improving the quality of musical learning through the provision of a first class teaching environment.

2011 Winner: Sidcot School, North Somerset

Sidcot School hosts annual Catrine Basil Music Awards Evening’s in January each year, inviting students from the country’s seven Quaker schools to take part, and all display high standards of musical ability. Pupils from Sidcot compete in several categories and demonstrate a vast range of musical disciplines including digital media, brass, piano and ensemble. All pupils are awarded a certificate of participation and winners receive the Conch Shell trophy. The Music Awards are designed to celebrate outstanding musical achievement among students. It honours Catrine, a talented musician pupil at Sidcot who died at 17 in an accident. The school won in the strings and digital composition categories. Musical professionalism was advanced with a new creative Arts Centre which includes a music school encompassing: a dedicated performance hall, practice rooms, a recording studio, music technology suite and drama department providing a studio for performances that can become a theatre for film.

Commended

Westonbirt School, Gloucestershire
Westonbirt School’s senior choristers became the School Choir of the Year at Bournemouth’s Music Festival in 2011, confirming the dynamic musical lifeblood of the school. Indeed, the year before, without exception, pupils achieved A*-A GCSE grades in their Music examinations.The bigger picture, however, of almost 20 percent of the whole school entering for music practical and theory examinations, demonstrates just how broad is the commitment to the subject and enjoyment of various choirs, music groups and orchestras. Facilities for developing the musical range released more creative flow with their formerly ancient Parish Church becoming the School’s Chapel of St Catherine, restored and tastefully redecorated for school worship, music recitals and small concerts. The breadth of Westonbirt’s capabilities are exemplified by major performances of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,’ which received rapturous applause and encores from two sell-out audiences when they performed recently.

Pate’s Grammar School, Cheltenham
Pate’s Grammar, founded in 1547, has a very modern, thriving music scene on par with so much else in which the school excels. Internationally oriented, over the last two years the First Orchestra has toured Prague and played at Symphony Hall as one of the country’s top ten school orchestras. The musical range includes jazz bands, wind ensemble, vocal group, choirs and a new samba band. A number of pupils in years’ seven to nine are selected to the join the gifted and talented scheme – a programme of workshops, master classes and concert trips. Recent examples include an Alexander Technique workshop, chamber music day, trip to hear the CBSO rehearse and to hear concerts in the Cheltenham Festival, and so on. Their Junior House Music competition also draws hundreds of enthusiastic participants; while through the Gloucester Schools Partnership for Music they also sang with Brit Award classical group winners Blake.