Enriching the lives of young people through music making
HMDT Music, twice winner of the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Education and winner of the Excellence in Musical Theatre Award, is a leader in creating inspiring arts projects for young people, which enrich learning and transform lives.
Working with world class artists and leading experts, HMDT increases access to high quality musical experiences which raise aspirations, achievement, confidence, skills and creativity, by commissioning new performance works, developing resources, creating enduring partnerships, and sustaining an extensive outreach programme to schools and the community in areas of disadvantage and deprivation.
Established in 1995 originally to work in Hackney, HMDT Music has grown into a highly-respected national charity working in several areas across England.
Our core areas of work are:
HMDT Music’s Saturday Programme serves over 350 students aged 6 months – 25 years on 30 Saturdays during each academic year. Started in 1995, it remains a vibrant and unique Saturday offering, providing a spectrum of individual projects involving guest visits and work with leading artists, alongside the continually expanding regular classes and programmes designed to enrich the lives of young people through music making. A source of local community pride, the programme also attracts students from across London and beyond.
The Saturday Programme includes The Music Box (under 5s programme), The Fledglings (for reception age students), I Can Sing! (Music Theatre Programme), CYMH Instrumental School, The Julian Joseph Jazz Academy and Music Treehouse (SEN/D Programme),.
The programme is supported by an extensive Bursary programme which supports students in financial need.
For over 25 years, HMDT Music has been creating unique, award-winning projects for schools since 1995. These include thematic commissions of new works for young people to perform supported by arts-embedded cross-curricular teaching resources.
Our commissions include RPS Award winners On London Fields and Confucius Says, as well as STEM Sisters, Hear Our Voice, Shadowball, The Brown Bomber, The Hackney Chronicles, The World Was All Before Them, and 2020 Music and Drama Education Award Winner Trench Brothers.
Our other work in schools includes cross-curricular projects embedding the arts across all learning such as TIME and the E Project which also underpins EDI, as well as bespoke workshops and projects, a and a wealth of education materials, all of which use the arts across the curriculum to enrich learning.
One Spirit is a music and creative arts based project specialising in working with young people in the criminal justice system, focused on those both in custody and recently released from custody.
The restorative based intervention programme has been running since 2010 and maintains a non-reoffending rate of 85%. Using music, drama and creative media to engage participants in learning activities, One Spirit improves their self-confidence and self-efficacy, personal and interpersonal skills, and functional and employability skills.
Its overarching, holistic aim is to help them to envisage, believe in and realise, a more positive future.
