Spring Workshops: Being Inspired

In February and March, professional composer David Önaç led 6 workshops with young people from across Tower Hamlets and Hackney, held at St Paul’s Way Trust Secondary School. David and Wyatt Sinfonia’s team of professional singers, including musicians from the Voces8 Foundation, facilitated workshops for around 180 young people from primary and secondary schools, where they created musical ideas and lyrics inspired by Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’ Suite.

After David’s engaging warm-ups, young people listened to excerpts of Holst’s work, before launching into creative tasks involving space exploration, time travel and alien encounters… Over the next few months, David is going to incorporate the young people’s ideas into new choral parts which will be sung by the young composers and their peers, alongside Wyatt Sinfonia’s professional musicians and singers, for a full performance of this exciting new version of Holst’s Suite in November 2026.

A big thank you to all of the young people for their creative ideas, to the teachers at the participating schools, to David Önaç and to Wyatt Sinfonia musicians for their continued commitment!

From young people who took part:

“I like knowing that my ideas are being turned into music that will be shared”

“I get to contribute to something big”