After many years ‘in the field’, Sean Gregory is Director of Creative Learning for the Barbican Centre and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As well as talking about his own workshop experiences, he explores some of the tensions and excitements of inviting participatory ‘localism’ into a large international art house.

Britten reminds us how sensitively he writes for people. I have created music primarily with people – I hope with a similar empathy. As a ‘composer-leader’, my competence and imagination in performance and composition has been complemented by skills such as leadership, communication, project management and team-working. Social attitudes and values have become as important to me as technical skill and musicianship, and the final pieces created have been owned by all of those involved.

Since the 1960s, there has been a move towards socially driven models for arts practice, particularly in the education world, involving practising artists working as facilitators, leaders and collaborative participants in workshop contexts. One of the motivations behind this ‘hands-on’ philosophy has been a desire to ensure that young people, in particular, feel engaged by the processes inside music-making. I would argue that these new models, along with the current climate of cultural, artistic and social ‘non-definability’, have helped to create a generation of artists from diverse backgrounds, disciplines and experiences; and, increasingly, the worlds of electronica, moving images, DJs, poets and dancers now sit comfortably alongside that of traditionally trained instrumentalists, creating new hybrids of music and performance that resonate in many contexts – from the school classroom or site-specific community contexts to the more established, ‘high-art’ venues of a concert hall, gallery, museum or theatre.

My own story reflects these changes. By the end of my undergraduate studies I had a diverse set of interests – composing individually and collaboratively, leading school workshops, performing in classical, rock, jazz and free improvisation ensembles, and acting and producing in theatre. Yet I did not know then how I could translate these experiences into a meaningful professional pathway.

Finding the Guildhall

The seminal moment in my development was the audition for the Performance and Communication Skills postgraduate course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1987.