The Ideas Fund

The Ideas Fund is an open-ended commission created to offer our musicians and composers the chance to intrepidly explore early-stage creative projects and ideas

We are thrilled to be supporting six Paraorchestra musicians and composers in the next round of our Ideas Fund as part of Modulate, our Artist Development programme.

This initiative brings fresh and exciting early-stage projects to life, and provides resources for them to reach the next level by offering small grants of between £1000-£2000 to Paraorchestra musicians and composers who identify as D/deaf, disabled or neurodiverse, to get their creative ideas off the ground. 

Read on to meet the artists and hear more about their projects.

Harry Bassett

An accomplished horn player, composer, and musical director at Diverse City, Harry is exploring his compositional processes within the broader scope of Jazz.

Focusing on communicating his ideas to an ensemble of three musicians without using notation, he’s collaborating with and directing them in real time. The main aim being to create with other people, instead of sitting in front of a computer. The musicians form a traditional jazz trio and will be equipped to respond to Harry’s ideas in a live scenario. 

Isaac Shieh

Building on the two pieces created as part of his year-long residency with Paraorchestra, Isaac is creating a film titled The Words That Don’t Reach - the final instalment of a triptych of works that explore lived experience of disability. Isaac is interested in the ambiguity of spoken word and movement: people watching the same things but having different experiences.

Isaac’s first two films were about him understanding his own identity as a disabled practitioner, and this third one moves into a more external focus. It seeks to explore the external barriers surrounding miscommunication and misunderstanding between disabled people and their carer(s) as well as their wider communities.

Jo Roughton-Arnold

Soprano Jo Roughton-Arnold is exploring a curated programme of work by women composers from the 20th and 21st century. As part of her research, Jo is spending time in the Welsh Marches familiarising herself with the architecture and textures of the area. This process will inform her performance of Cecilia McDowall’s Radnors Songs: a six-song cycle celebrating the beauty of the historic borderlands between Wales and England.

Connecting the reality of a physical space to the act of classical singing allows Jo to embody the protagonist of the piece in a way that welcomes an audience into her unique perspective. Jo performed these songs recently at Bradshaw Hall at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire with pianist Nigel Foster.

Lauren Martin

A continuation of her PhD research on gender, personality and contemporary bassoon playing, Lauren is collaborating with a composer to create new work that explores the personalities and styles of both the performer and the composer. She is exploring what happens when the two blend and meld rather than come into the space separately, focusing on facilitating what she terms “collaboration without hierarchy.”

Lauren will hold a research session with a composer, devising a new way of notating that encompasses both the composer and performer’s intentions in a new work for the bassoon. These will form a blueprint for effective and equal collaboration, where each artist is represented authentically.

Meadow Brooks

Percussionist Meadow Brooks is using her grant to explore new ideas for percussion and trumpet duo instrumentation with a responding composer. 

Meadow and her collaborators are digging into the intricacies of orchestration whilst broadening the table for underrepresented artists in the contemporary classical canon. Aiming to expand the repertoire for the duo, as well as raise the profile of talented early-career collaborators, Meadow’s project also extends to a young composer who is shadowing the responding composer, gaining valuable insight and skills from being a part of this process.

With a performance and recording in the future, this pilot allows Meadow to build a template for accessible and inclusive ways of working long-term.

Oliver Vibrans

Oliver Vibrans’ Ideas Fund project takes the form of a collaboration with dancer Aisha Naamani, exploring together what making their own work looks like outside the boundaries of responding to a brief. Oli and Aisha met on our BBC Proms commission The Virtuous Circle and hit it off. Both are highly sought-after artists in their fields, but never have the free time or resources to work on their own projects.

Oliver and Aisha are developing and documenting new ways of working with each other, exploring iterative and intuitive approaches to creating multi-disciplinary art. Working with both pre-prepared material and improvisation, they’re experimenting with new movement language via apparatus in outdoor park settings, and musical material based on field recordings taken in Beirut.