HarmonieMusik, the wind-players of St Helens Sinfonietta, get better and better, both in their playing and their programming.
On Saturday at the URC (with its newly refurbished, more-accessible entrance) they produced a veritable delight of styles, moods and groupings of the nine players to keep a good-sized audience constantly diverted and entertained.

Got to add the link to the piece about Steve in the Star. Well done Steve on getting that music-net mention.

Meeting tomorrow - 2 til 3.30 at the Citadel in St Helens - all welcome.

We don't have a speaker so it'll be a general discussion and update.

Steve and Tim spent 2 glorious days with Bleakhill Primary School last week. They provided Song writing and Percussion
workshops and, on the last day, got the young people to perform their songs.
Steve, who is also a music-net director, said "When we had the Headmaster on stage playing "we will rock you"
with the year 5 classes, we thought the roof was going to come off! We followed this by ending the performance and indeed the whole Arts week with "I predict a riot", and there very nearly was."

600 joyous pupils plus Teachers and Staff all bouncing up and down and loving it.

Africa Oyé is the UK’s largest free celebration of African music and culture and takes place annually in Liverpool. Beginning in 1992 as a series of small gigs in the city centre, the event has gone from strength-to-strength, moving to its present Sefton Park home in 2002 to cope with demand. Now in its seventeenth year, Africa Oyé continues to grow. In 2008 the event attracted an audience of over 20,000 people and even more are expected to attend Oyé 09.

Have you noticed the link on the right hand side of our home page - rss feeds make it much easier to keep up to date with the latest content on websites.

What do you think of the explanation? Let us know!

As part of it’s ‘Big Idea’ section, the online BBC Magazine featured an article from neuroscientist Gregory Berns this week, suggesting that if everyone learned to make music, the world would be a better place:

‘When I say make music, that means sing, play an instrument, or simply bang out a rhythm by whatever means that are available to you... It doesn't matter whether you have talent or if you think you're tone deaf - the simple act of producing a rhythmic or harmonious statement, teaches us skills that so often fall by the wayside in modern life.

Review of recent gigs - sent in by participants in the project:

The mid-point of February of this year saw the ever-rising band, “Silent Thunder” hit the limelight, as they wowed audiences of the north-west with their quirky, mainstream indie/ alternative musical agenda.

Photo by Lizzie Coombes from the 'Inside Out' exhibition

Heading inside the gates of Risley prison last Friday, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had no prior warning what kind of concert this was going to be. No idea of the type of music or the skills of the performers. Just some vague notion that Music in Prisons had a great track record, and that evaluation of their project shows the huge impact that they have on people’s lives.

The St. Helens Sinfonietta splits into two for its early concerts of 2009, fancifully entitled Sympathetic Strings and Favourable Winds. The first instalment, conducted as usual by Alan Free, was given on Saturday 28th February at the impressively refurbished and modernised St. Thomas’s Church, remembered as the venue of the Sinfonietta’s very first concert in 1997.