King Edward's Music

CO-CURRICULAR

Made possible by the partnership between King Edward’s School and King Edward VI High School, we offer an unparalleled co-curricular experience for our pupils – we aim to be the day schools of choice for every musical girl or boy.

The close musical collaboration between these two great schools started in 1960, when Tim Tunnard and Christine Douglas together founded KES/KEHS Symphony Orchestra. The early collaboration helped to form David Munrow, John Deathridge, Maggie Faultless, Paul Griffiths, and Stanley Myers; more recent alumni now lead the Hallé Orchestra (Robbie Ruisi), won BBC Young Musician in 2018 (Lauren Zhang), and won the Benslow Young Composers’ Competition and the National Centre For Early Music Composition Prize in 2022 (Christopher Churcher). Music is at the heart of the two schools’ lives, is central to our partnership work, and plays an important role in our city.

KES/KEHS Symphony continues to be one of the great symphony orchestras for young people — 88 strong this year — performing full orchestral programmes each year. In the last six seasons, the joint orchestra’s repertoire has included Mahler’s First and Fourth Symphonies, Shostakovich’s Fifth, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Brahms’s Third, as well as the Fifth and Eighth Symphonies of Beethoven. There are three major choirs and a joint Choral Society, and in them about 270 girls, boys, and staff sing together each week. Recent performances have included Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Jenkins’s The Armed Man. There are two swing bands, two further orchestras, two wind bands, and a thriving programme of chamber music (works by Brahms, Bridge, and Barber this season). KES Choir is the mighty exception to our work together – currently numbering about 100 boys, the choir mixes age and musical experience, and gives a carol service each year.

King Edward’s and King Edward VI High school together stage about 30 concerts, platforms, and recitals each year, in the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre, our home base, as well as Symphony Hall, Birmingham, the University of Birmingham concert halls, and churches and Cathedrals in our city.

We have a team of 32 visiting teachers – distinguished performing musicians in their own right – who deliver over 250 instrumental lessons each week. There are 14 major weekly-rehearsing ensembles and choirs, as well as string and wind quartets, piano trios, quartets, and quintets, string sextets, and other chamber ensembles. Composers join Clef Club, and their works are performed in public and recorded.

The Ruddock Performing Arts Centre is our principal rehearsal and performance venue, a 450-seat concert hall with superb acoustics, equipped with concert organ and Steinway model-D grand piano. We play regularly in Symphony Hall as well as the Barber Institute and the Bramall Concert Hall at the University of Birmingham. The music department has teaching, rehearsal, and practice rooms, two music IT suites, a library, and a recording studio.

Informal enquiries may be addressed to the Director of Music, Dr. Martin Leigh, using:

music@kes.org.uk

ACADEMIC

Music is a golden thread running through the life of the school, our work in the classroom informing our performances in the concert hall, and vice versa. 

The curriculum is highly-academic, ambitious and wide-ranging, our examinations numbers strong, and we currently have students reading undergraduate and postgraduate music at Oxford, Durham, Manchester, and Chicago universities.

All boys study music in the Shell Year (Year 7) and the Remove (Year 8); two periods a week is a generous allocation, and makes it possible for pupils who come to us with little musical experience to catch up with those who are already accomplished musicians.

We teach IGCSE Music, which offers the intellectual rigour appropriate for our boys, as well as preparing them for IB music.

IB music is the academic pinnacle of our school, its course-work-based approach meaning that boys can research, compose, perform, and write about their own musical enthusiasms. Recent work has ranged from composition in the style of Messiaen, through Latin American baroque music, through Bill Evans and Miles Davis, to John Adams, and Bela Bartók.

After music degrees, boys pursue careers as performers and composers, as academic musicians and band members, or to undertake further study – in Britain and further afield. IB Music and degrees in music or with a musical component are increasingly taken by employers to mean that potential employees are creative, collaborative, as well as highly-organised and capable of working independently.