Events marking HMDT Music's 30th anniversary open on 17 May with a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of VE Day. We’ll Meet Again is a compilation of HMDT commissions about the second world war, including ‘The Blitz’ scene from Jonathan Dove’s and Alasdair Middleton’s opera The Hackney Chronicles, excerpts from HMDT’s Home Front revue I’ll Be Seeing You (2005) by Matthew King and Alasdair Middleton, and music from Hear Our Voice by Jonathan Dove and Matthew King, set to a libretto Tertia Sefton-Green compiled from the writings of children of the Holocaust. It will be performed by HMDT’s I Can Sing! choir at the Bridge Academy at 2.30pm.
I Can Sing! perform again on 12 July (6pm, Bridge Academy), this time with the CYMH Orchestra and HMDT’s patron, the cellist Natalie Clein, in Matthew King’s Odyssean Variations; Clein premiered the work in 2008. It narrates the adventures of Odysseus’s ten-year journey home after the battle of Troy.
Since the turn of the millennium, HMDT has commissioned a number of community-based operas and other works, some with local themes, including The World Was All Before Them and On London Fields (both 2004), Hear Our Voice, an international music and art project working with students from Nuremberg, Prague and Hackney (2006), Confucius Says (2008), Shadowball (2010), The Brown Bomber (2012), and Trench Brothers (2014).
HMDT was set up in 1995 by Hackney Council as a fundraising programme to support the first Centre for Young Musicians satellite Junior Centre. Early projects included helping young artists with the business side of music-making, and ‘Opportunities through Music’, a project on local housing estates offering a range of DJ, dance, singing, and saxophone workshops alongside an Elders choir with the aim of engaging residents in getting to know each other and live together in harmony.
In 2012 HMDT became independent from Hackney, rebranding itself as HMDT Music, and expanded its work nationally across the country, including through its partnership with Creative Education Trust and Academies in Norfolk and the Midlands.
HMDT Music runs a Saturday instrumental school, which provides an orchestra, jazz, music theatre, The Music Box (for early years) and Music Treehouse (SEND). One Spirit is a programme for young people on the verge of exclusion, using the arts for rehabilitation, which has now been taken up by several young offenders institutions in the south of England.
