As preparations are underway for a special concert tomorrow night (Wednesday 7 May) celebrating the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, we take a moment to reflect on the remarkable journey of the manuscript that inspired Bach 1725. Newly acquired by the Bodleian Libraries in 2024, this treasured document, rich with historical significance, offers a rare glimpse into Bach’s creative process in the mid-1720s. In the article below, the Bodleian Libraries’ Alfred Brendel Curator of Music, Martin Holmes, explores the story behind the manuscript, tracing its path through the centuries to its new home in Oxford, and the steps taken to preserve it for future generations.
News that the Bodleian Libraries might acquire a Bach autograph first reached me in April 2023. Since only two other institutions in the country have Bach autograph manuscripts in their possession, the possibility of one coming to Oxford was immensely exciting. It was being offered in lieu of inheritance tax by the family of Sir Ralph and Lady Kohn and the application was being handled by Sotheby’s. I was immediately set to work on building a case for Oxford as the Government began the process of assessing the tax value of the manuscript and deciding to which institution it should be allocated. It was known that the Kohn family were keen for it to come to the Bodleian but that outcome was not a foregone conclusion. However, with the help of Dr Stephen Roe (formerly of Sotheby’s) and current Sotheby’s staff, the application was assembled and after a tense few months the final decision to allocate the manuscript to the Bodleian was made by the then Secretary of State and communicated to Bodley’s Librarian by Arts Council England. The manuscript was delivered to Oxford on 29 January 2024 and unpacked with much anticipation (and not a little trepidation) by Bodley’s Librarian and a small group of senior Special Collections staff.
Sir Ralph Kohn (1927–2016) had purchased the manuscript at a Sotheby’s sale in 1989, and it was considered to be the last major Bach manuscript in private hands. Sir Ralph was a distinguished biomedical scientist and pharmaceutical entrepreneur. He was also a keen musician and an accomplished amateur singer who, having been born in Leipzig, felt a natural affinity with J.S. Bach. A discerning collector, he built up a choice collection of musical manuscripts and first editions of works which meant a lot to him.
After Bach’s death in 1750, the manuscript scores of most of his works were inherited by his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann (1710–1784) who was living in Halle at the time. It is clear that W.F. Bach performed the work himself at some point, since some of his markings have been detected on the manuscript. He moved to Berlin in 1774 where he remained for the rest of his life and taught the harpsichord to Sarah Levy, Felix Mendelssohn’s great-aunt.
What happened to the manuscript next is not quite clear. W.F. Bach is known to have had financial troubles and sold off some of his father’s manuscripts. However, in 1827, it was acquired, along with manuscripts of a dozen more cantatas from W.F. Bach’s estate, by Carl Pistor (1778–1847), a civil servant with an obsession for precision optical instruments, which he manufactured in conjunction with one of Felix Mendelssohn’s uncles. He was also a passionate music lover and gave the young Felix the task of sorting his collection. Pistor’s daughter Betty sang with Mendelssohn in the Berlin Singakademie and she was the object of his teenage affections for a while until a rift developed between the two families. Betty Pistor eventually married Adolf A.F. Rudorff (1803–1873) and the manuscript remained in their possession until around 1854 when it was given to the conductor and composer Robert Radecke (1830–1911). From him, it passed to his grandson, Ewald Radecke (1907–1979) and it remained in the Radecke family until coming to auction at Sotheby’s in 1989.
The manuscript comprises sixteen pages in four unbound bifolia. In common with most of Bach’s manuscripts, it was written on paper with corrosive iron-gall ink which presents modern conservators with a considerable challenge if these documents are to survive for future generations to study and enjoy. A particular problem with music notation is that the forming of note heads causes high concentration of ink in small areas which often causes brown discoloration beside the ink and through the paper. In acute cases, the ink can literally burn through the paper, creating cracks and losses where notes should be and severely weakening the structure of the paper. Given the corrosive nature of the ink Bach used, it is difficult to arrest this process completely.
Over the years, Bach manuscripts have been subjected to a variety of treatments, from splitting each page in two and inserting an acid-free barrier between them, to washing the paper with alkaline solutions. The Bodleian’s approach in this case is to avoid interventive measures and provide effective mitigation solutions. The priority will be to ensure that the manuscript can be securely housed and handled without risk of further damage. The bifolia, protected in custom made archival folders and box, will be stored in controlled environmental conditions. Handling will be kept to an absolute minimum. No further treatment is planned at this stage.
As soon as it arrived in Oxford, the manuscript was photographed by the Bodleian’s studio and high-quality digital images are now freely available in Digital Bodleian. Scans can never be a complete substitute for an original manuscript but the images will enable scholars and others with an interest in Bach to study many aspects of the music and the process of its composition without having to handle the original. In due course, modern multi-spectral imaging techniques could be used to reveal more about aspects of the manuscript which are less obvious to the naked eye, such as different layers of annotations on the score.
The cantata was first edited for publication by A. Dörffel in 1878, for the Bach-Gesellschaft edition, and the manuscript was presumably borrowed for that purpose. Indeed, discrete markings can be found in the manuscript which were added at that time. In 1960, it was re-edited by Alfred Dürr for the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, taking account of a surviving set of performing parts in Berlin. It is therefore unlikely that renewed study of the Kohn manuscript will cause radical changes to be made to the accepted musical text of the work. However, the manuscript will enable successive generations of scholars and students to see how Bach committed his thoughts to paper and feel the presence of one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time.
Martin Holmes is the Alfred Brendel Curator of Music, Bodleian Libraries. He studied Music at Worcester College, Oxford and first joined the Bodleian’s Music Section nearly forty years ago. After several cataloguing projects in Music and Rare Books, including the Tenbury and Harding collections and the library of John Locke, he spent a period as Head of Catalogue Support Services before returning to head up the Music Section on the retirement of Peter Ward Jones in 2009. He has a particular interest in English music and has written on various subjects, including the composer Ernest Farrar, the development of the Bodleian’s legal deposit music collections and the provincial book trade.
The manuscript is currently on display until 17 August 2025 as part of Bach: A Composer’s Obsession, a free display in Blackwell Hall, Weston Library. The manuscript is shown alongside a selection of items which illustrate the importance of Bach in the life and work of a later composer, Felix Mendelssohn.
Bach 1725, with a manuscript viewing and pre-concert talk, will take place at the Sheldonian Theatre on Wednesday 7 May.
The Cultural Programme is looking to engage a film consultant to undertake a short piece of consultancy to advise on the model for the film programme at the Schwarzman Centre Cultural Programme.
Requirement: an expert in the business of film programming is invited to respond to the brief through meetings with the Cultural Programme team and through the writing of a written report.
The consultant is not expected to undertake external meetings to map the landscape, or consult on the strategy around film, but the report may identify defined areas where further consultation is required.
The report should address:
1. How can a film programme best respond to Cultural Programme mission & vision and the context of the programme in Oxford’s Schwarzman Centre?
- What are the potential strands of the programme?
- Articulate these strands in relationship to audiences, artists, academic connection (both research and learning), partnerships, financial models, funders?
- Which strands should be priorities and why?
- Which strands should be avoided and why?
2. What resources does the Film Programme need, depending on its activity level:
- Financial resource
- Human resource
- Options around staffing a film programme? (Does it need a single programmer, or will we benefit from working with a range of curators? In which case, what management and administrative support will the programme need?)
Further details:
We expect this work to be completed within five (5) working days, ideally within May or June.
Payment will be after the completion of work. We expect to make payment via invoice. Individuals paid by the University must be set up on the University supplier system in advance of submitting an invoice.
TO APPLY:
To submit an Expression of Interest, please provide a CV and cover note (including details of your availability and day rate) to the Cultural Programme by Monday 28 April 2025. Please include “Film Consultant EOI” in the subject line.
Email to submit EOI: culturalprogramme@humanities.ox.ac.uk
Cultural Programme, Humanities Division, University of Oxford
The Cultural Programme brings together university, local and global cultural communities in a physical and digital arts centre, powered by the University of Oxford’s research. We promote broad engagement with the riches of the humanities by working with outstanding artists, writers and thinkers from around the world to create and present world-class arts and culture. Innovative and diverse, and delivered across music, theatre, dance, film and visual arts our programmes will be delivered in collaboration with university, local, national and international partners.
At the heart of our vision lies our commitment to:
- Creativity – unlocking new forms of digital authorship, imagination and participation
- People – empowering individuals and communities to generate and explore new forms of knowledge and experience and to become leaders in their own fields and disciplines
- Planet — we want to be connected locally, regionally and globally, in the most environmentally sustainable ways possible
- Innovation – advancing cutting-edge research methodologies in the arts and humanities at the interface of new technologies and digital media
Currently working offsite, from 2026, the Cultural Programme will be located within the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. The Schwarzman Centre will bring together seven of the faculties in the Humanities Division, an Institute for Ethics in AI and a multi-disciplinary cultural centre containing Oxford’s first purpose-built concert hall as well as further spaces for music, theatre, spoken word, literature, digital, film and exhibitions. As well as working in the new spaces of the Schwarzman Centre, the Cultural Programme will continue to deliver an offsite programme.
The Schwarzman Centre is a unique proposition bringing together a broad spectrum of academic and artistic disciplines teaching, research and public engagement including through arts and culture. The humanities embrace all the academic and artistic disciplines which together help us to develop our understanding of what it means to be human.
For more information, please visit https://oxfordculturalprogramme.org.uk.
Ahead of Bach 1725, Professor Martyn Harry spoke with renowned composer Judith Weir, whose new composition will premiere at the celebration concert on Wednesday 7 May. Commissioned by the Bodleian Libraries, Weir’s piece offers a contemporary reflection on Bach’s Ascension Day Cantata (BWV 128). Known for her innovative approach to storytelling through music, Weir shares the inspiration behind this new work, her experience of engaging with Bach’s music, and what she hopes audiences will experience during this special celebration.
Martyn Harry: Can you please tell us about your new work Upwards and how it relates to the Bach manuscript celebrated in tonight’s concert?
Judith Weir: I approached Upwards as an overture to the Bach cantata we are talking about – Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein. It uses the same instruments as the whole cantata, including two horns and trumpet. Although I think it’s the case that in Bach’s day the trumpet player would have been one of the horn players, I took the opportunity to have the whole lot of them. I wanted it to be very closely related to the first movement of the cantata, because after all my piece will be immediately preceding that first movement. In other words, I was ignoring the rest of the cantata and just looking at that huge opening movement, which is a chorale-prelude, with a chorale sung by the trebles, very slowly over the top of the music.
I looked at the Bach both in the manuscript and the printed version, and started off by looking at actual figures that Bach uses to accompany his chorale. From there, I started to add my own notes and rhythmic figures. The thing that is so obvious in the whole cantata (about Ascension Day) is that the chorale melody in this movement is very flat in terms of contour whereas everybody else is playing leaping upwards figures all the time. So that really became my concept for the piece: the individual things that people play should always tend to be upwards scales or melodies in some way. And generally speaking, the music moves upwards through the piece and ends as an almost pictorial attempt at going up into the sky.
MH: This commission presents an exciting challenge in writing for the instruments and players of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. What is your approach for composing for early music instruments?
JW: I think particularly with instruments that we don’t really have now, like the oboe d’amore and the oboe da caccia, just to try and find out about them. To imagine as closely as possible the experience of the performers as they play these instruments. Speaking about those woodwind instruments, they don’t have so many helpful keys as modern instruments, so you have to think about the shape of your melodies: will this work for them? And of course, looking at these incredibly high brass parts in both the horns and the trumpets that we’re not used to in modern orchestral music. It would be a big ask to have, for instance, the horns playing quite so high all the time, but it certainly seems to work in the Bach.
So, I think my approach there is just to try and understand how those instruments are played and how can they do that. And of course it is terribly important to try and work out what the instruments can’t do, so for instance, these natural horns, they don’t have any extra valves, so you have to imagine them just playing a metal tube that can just play the harmonic series, plus maybe a little bit where the embouchure, the lip position, might help you to play something a little flatter or something like that. But on the whole, I try not to think of it as a restriction, it’s a chance to hear very different tones in the music I am going to write.
MH: When I first met you, you played the oboe. Have you found yourself re-engaging with your own playing experience of the oboe, given that there are three different types of oboe available in this piece?
JW: Well, I was lucky as a student that someone lent me a baroque oboe (it might have been a reconstruction). I didn’t make much of it! It was terrifically hard to think about how to create a reed and get it to do anything. So, I massively admire all the people in the last fifty years who have done that to such a high standard.
My memories of playing Bach as an oboe player are about the breath, the enormous solos that you play, particularly in the solo arias – we’ve got one actually in this piece – and just how strong and how careful you have to be about finding places to breathe. I do marvel at the fact that Bach’s work is just full of these. They are gorgeous tunes; they’re probably the best ever. But oboe music, it’s extremely difficult to play. And I guess, seeing these historical instruments, at least the physical strain isn’t so great, but I would think the finger problems must be pretty considerable!
Professor Martyn Harry is Professor of Composition at the Music Faculty, University of Oxford as well as a Fellow and Tutor at St Anne’s College and Lecturer at St Hilda’s College.
If you’d like to be there for the premiere of Judith Weir’s new work Upwards as part of a Bach celebratory concert, tickets are still available for Bach 1725 taking place on Wednesday 7 May. Presented by the Cultural Programme at Oxford University and the Bodleian Libraries.
On Wednesday 7th May 2025, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will mark the 300th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1725 Ascension Day cantata Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein (BWV 128) with a performance at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre produced by the Oxford Cultural Programme. The event will feature a world premiere from Judith Weir, one of the UK’s most celebrated contemporary composers, commissioned by the Bodleian Libraries. Weir’s composition was created in direct response to the autograph manuscript of Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein, acquired by the Bodleian Libraries via the government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme in 2024.
The concert is a rare opportunity to experience Bach’s festive and colourful composition for orchestra, chorus, and soloists, originally written for Ascension Day in May 1725. John Butt, a world-leading Bach scholar and performer, will direct the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment alongside the Choir of New College, Oxford, under the guidance of its director, Robert Quinney. Adding to the evening’s significance, the programme will feature new works from student composers Daniel Reynolds and Nick Samuel from the Faculty of Music at Oxford University, responding to Bach’s enduring legacy.
The Kohn manuscript of BWV 128, formerly owned by the Leipzig-born collector Sir Ralph Kohn, is one of only four Bach manuscripts in the UK. It will appear on public display at the Weston Library ahead of the concert, offering audiences a rare chance to connect Bach’s creative process to a tangible object. Despite his prolific production, very few of Bach’s works were published in his lifetime, and without the miraculous survival of his autograph manuscripts in institutional collections, most of his masterpieces would be lost. The document has been exceptionally well cared for and the erosion of paper is mostly limited to the edges, making this one of the best-preserved autographs of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Judith Weir’s New Composition
As part of this celebration, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will premiere a new work by Judith Weir, former Master of the King’s Music, commissioned by the Bodleian Libraries. Renowned for her innovative approach to storytelling through music, Weir’s composition will offer a contemporary reflection on themes from Bach’s cantata. The manuscript of this new work will pass into the Bodleian Libraries’ collections, meaning that both this new work and Bach’s original piece will be preserved for posterity.
Judith Weir said: “Following so closely in J S Bach’s footsteps – and indeed his pen strokes and ink blots – has been a unique and joyous experience. Mirroring Bach’s original score note-for-note, it’s impossible not to be influenced by the extraordinary energy and uplift of his Ascension music. The opportunity to present my new score to the Bodleian Libraries reflects my own feeling of inheritance as a lifelong listener to Bach’s music.”
Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein
Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein was composed for the feast of the Ascension, 10 May 1725, celebrating Christ’s triumphant rise to Heaven forty days after the Resurrection, but it did not appear in print until 1878, 150 years after it was composed.
The short, festive cantata, which lasts less than 20 minutes in performance, is scored for two horns, three different types of oboe, trumpet, strings and continuo, with four-part chorus, and alto, tenor and bass soloists. Its five movements comprise a celebratory opening chorus, a short recitative and aria for bass voice, a duet for alto and tenor, ending with a simple chorale. The music for this cantata was all new, which is relatively unusual for Bach who frequently recycled and adapted movements from his other compositions.
The text for Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein was written by Marianne von Ziegler—the only known female librettist Bach worked with. A pioneering figure in 18th-century Leipzig, von Ziegler was an accomplished poet and intellectual who defied societal norms, gaining recognition in her lifetime without adopting a male pseudonym. Her collaborations with Bach in 1725 produced a sequence of extraordinary cantatas, yet the full extent of their working relationship remains a mystery.
Bach 1725 is taking place on Wednesday 7 May at the Sheldonian Theatre – tickets are available now. You can also look at the Kohn manuscript online on Digital Bodleian.
In 1725, Johann Sebastian Bach partnered with poet Christiana Mariana von Ziegler for a series of nine cantatas. Bach’s compositions combine choral and instrumental music, and were crafted to enhance the religious services of the Lutheran church throughout the liturgical year.
Christiana Mariana von Ziegler assisted Bach as his librettist – she provided the words to be used alongside his music. This International Women’s Day, we’re uncovering a lesser-known chapter in the history of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata for Ascension Day: ‘Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein’ (BWV 128), Kohn manuscript, which was acquired by the Bodleian Library in 2024.
Ahead of the Bach 1725 celebration this spring, marking 300 years since the first performance of Bach’s cantata for Ascension Day, join Professor Henrike Lähnemann as she explores the life, legacy, and contributions of one of Bach’s key collaborators.
In 1725, Johann Sebastian Bach faced a dilemma: he had run out of texts for the weekly offering of cantatas to be performed in the main churches of Leipzig, and there were still nine Sundays to fill for the prime festive season of the year, from Jubilate Sunday (the third after Easter) via Ascension and Whitsun to Trinity Sunday, the feast that still gives its name to Oxford’s third term. To his rescue came a young woman, Christiana Mariana von Ziegler (1695–1760). She provided, with a remarkably quick turn-around, the libretti for the Sundays that Bach was still missing in order to complete his second choral cantata cycle, among them the Ascension Day cantata ‘Auf Christi Himmelfahrt allein’ which became BWV 128, the autograph manuscript of which is now held in the Bodleian Library. Who was this woman who could so readily produce singable verse which would be very publicly performed in the city space?
Christiana Mariana von Ziegler held an unusual position in Leipzig at the time. Having already been widowed twice and having lost the children from both marriages, she returned to her mother’s house in Leipzig in 1722 and turned it into a literary and musical salon – one of the few artistic meeting places Leipzig had to offer, and Bach, who took the position as Thomaskantor (musical director) in 1723, was a regular visitor, as well as Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766), the heavy-weight critic of his age who arrived in Leipzig in 1724.
The cantata collaboration of Ziegler and Bach is a product of this artistic networking in the Leipzig circle. Particularly fascinating is that the cantata text shows an ongoing debate about the nature of religious poetry. Ziegler’s secular texts tended to display enlightenment characteristics: critical, satirical, formally balanced and full of learned references. Bach, on the other side, usually chose libretto writers close to the Pietist movement of his time and kept his distance to the rationalist style of poetry of the Gottsched circle.
Ziegler’s cantata texts show that she tried to accommodate Bach’s wishes and completely dispensed with the unusual comparisons and playful allegories that she otherwise loved. For the cantatas, she, like Bach’s other lyricists, drew from the sermon literature of the time and incorporated traditional exegetical material. The argumentation structure of the cantata BWV 128 depends on the popular sermon cycle Evangelischer Hertzens-Spiegel (‘Gospel-based Mirror for the Heart’, 1679) by the theologian and poet Heinrich Müller (1631–1675), which was continuously reprinted until in the 18th and 19th centuries and formed part of both von Ziegler’s and Bach’s library. Still, Bach intervened more heavily with her libretti than with any other text he set, emphasizing biblical quotations and adding a warning against trying to intellectually grasp God’s secret. Reading his autograph manuscript against her published version of the cantata text opens up a glimpse into the intellectual debates about religion and human understanding which must have been going on in the meetings at Ziegler’s house.
What became of Ziegler after this collaboration with Bach? She published the cantata texts four years later, joined with other devotional poems to form a cycle ( ‘Andächtige Gedichte’) in the second volume of her ‘Versuch in gebundener Schreib-Art’ (‘attempt in the art of verse writing’), which earned her as first and only woman a membership of Gottsched’s ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft’. This ‘German Literary Society’ was part of the early enlightenment movement and publicly active to promote German literature and language. This in turn made Ziegler eligible for the society’s annual poetry prize which she won twice, in 1732 and 1734. On 17 October 1733, she was made Poet Laureate by the University of Wittenberg – the Baroque equivalent of the Noble Prize for Literature. Her early collaboration with Bach was clearly an indication of great things to come!
When I grew up in the 70s and 80s, the two pink paperback volumes of Alfred Dürr’s edition of Bach cantata texts had their permanent place next to the radio on the bookshelf in the vicarage of my grandparents, to be perused on Sunday mornings to follow the text of the weekly broadcast of the Bach cantata for the day. It was a cultural practice in many households around Germany and the common sentiment was: ‘wonderful music, pity about the text’ – the emotional piety focussing on the wounds of Christ and Baroque exuberance of images sat uneasily with post-war sober and minimalist aesthetics.
When Elke Axmacher, a young lecturer at the Kirchliche Hochschule Berlin, a theological college then part of the Freie Universität, offered a seminar in the summer term of 1991 focussing on the theology, imagery and rhetoric of the cantata texts, I was intrigued. I borrowed my grandparents’ by now faded pink volumes and set out to read my way through it from the perspective as literature. I was most struck by the aesthetic sense and well-crafted poetics of the Ascension Cantata by Christiane Mariane von Ziegler. And I was also fascinated when I realised that it was the cantata text with which Bach had probably most heavily intervened and wrote my essay for the course on this cantata. Imagine my delight when 33 years after this seminar I learned that the Bodleian Library had acquired the autograph manuscript of this particular cantata – and that this coincides with the start of a major new edition project at the University of Karlsruhe which will highlight the feminist and enlightenment aspects of Ziegler’s work.
I am looking forward to a workshop with musicologists, theologians, and philologists in May from Germany, Switzerland and Britain to discuss Ziegler’s texts after listening to Bach’s setting of her cantata text in the glorious surroundings of the Sheldonian Theatre!
Tickets for the Bach 1725 celebration on Wednesday 7 May, including a manuscript viewing and evening performance by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Choir of New College Oxford, are available now.
On Friday 28th February we followed Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective for a day dedicated to exploring the powerful connections between music and wellbeing. Join us as we reflect on this thought-provoking and transformative event.
We started the morning with a rejuvenating early morning yoga session in Blackwell Hall, led by Kaleidoscope performer and yoga teacher Elena Urioste. Aimed at musicians and performers, but open to all, the class set the stage for an uplifting and inspiring day ahead.
Our mid-morning coffee was accompanied by beautiful music in Blackwell Hall, with a pop up preview performance from two members of the Collective.
This was followed by a thought-provoking ‘Thriving in the Spotlight’ panel discussion in the Sheldonian Theatre. Professor Eric Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Music, spoke with Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective about the physical and mental pressures faced by musicians, often hidden behind the music. The panel shared their own experiences with the audience, and ways they work to overcome challenging feelings before, during, and after performing.
The day concluded with an immersive evening concert in which guests were encouraged to enjoy a truly individual listening experience, with moments of personal reflection, and a celebration of the audience’s shared connection. At the start of the performance, Elena Urioste led the audience in a breathing exercise. Some guests opted to relax on beanbags in the round, inspiring a fresh take on the traditional concert experience. Guests were taken on a journey of musical discovery, with a repertoire exploring themes of dreams, hope, and spirituality.
The evening began with a stunning atmospheric solo performance by Jonathan Leibovitz, who played a Chinese folk song, Xiǎo hé tǎng shuǐ (Flowing River), from the top of the Sheldonian. Many audience members, still immersed in the calm of the earlier breathing exercises, kept their eyes closed, enhancing the meditative atmosphere.
This tranquil moment was followed by an energetic duo performance on violins from Elena Urioste and Savitri Grier, who performed Jessie Montgomery’s vibrant composition, Musings for two violins. Rosalind Ventris (viola) joined the stage for a beautiful rendition of Persian folk songs, Agar yār-ī-manī and Bodo bodo bodo, newly arranged by Kaleidoscope founder Tom Poster.
The mood shifted to a more reflective tone as Laura van der Heijden (cello) joined for Beethoven’s emotional String Quartet in A minor, Op. 132. Composed as a gesture of gratitude following a period of serious illness, the piece conveyed deep emotions of relief, and appreciation for health and for life.
The concert concluded with a captivating quintet performance of The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, a work that traces the history of Judaism and explores themes of language, memory, and identity. The piece, a moving exploration of cultural and spiritual history, brought the evening to a powerful close.
On Saturday 5 July 2025 we will come together again for food, stalls, music, dance, sports, arts, crafts, fashion, theatre, and spoken word as part of the Leys Festival. It will be a celebration of our community, and an important event in Oxford’s calendar. The Leys Festival was planned and made last summer (2024) by a group of residents of Blackbird Leys and Greater Leys working with a team from the Cultural Programme at the University of Oxford. Watch highlights from last year’s festival:
This year the Festival will return to Blackbird Leys Park on Saturday 5 July. The planning group (Residents and University) have already started dreaming up an even bigger and better event and are looking for anyone who would like to get involved.
The theme will be One People One Place, and we will celebrate all the bridges we build in our community. There will be food, stalls, music, dance, sport, arts, crafts, fashion, exhibitions, spoken word and theatre, all from The Leys.
WE NEED YOUR HELP
We want to make sure that as many voices as possible are included in the Festival and we’d love to hear your ideas, we also need plenty of volunteers to make the Festival happen. We promise you’ll have fun!
There are three ways to get involved:
1. Help plan the festival
Come along to the monthly planning meetings; they are fun, sociable, everyone gets a chance to contribute and there is always good food.
The next one is on Thursday 6 March at Activate Learning, Cuddesdon Way, Oxford, OX4 6HN from 6-8pm.
Join a working group – small groups of volunteers who meet online looking at the following areas:
- The Food Festival and Stalls
- Schools and youth groups
- Music/Dance/Stage programme
- Fundraising
- Mentoring and skills
- Stories of the Leys
2. Get Creative
Let us know you would like to perform, or host a stall or an activity at the Festival. Everyone welcome so let us know what you’d like to do and we will try to fit you in.
OR
Share a story about The Leys, about the history or the future of this place or about a person who has made a difference or just something funny or interesting about this community. We’re going to make a piece of theatre about our community or come along to a story workshop, next one on Thursday 13 March in the afternoon – details tbc.
OR
Join a singing workshop to create a song for The Leys.
3. Volunteer on the day
We’ll need loads of people to help make the event welcoming, safe and fun. You could:
Volunteer to run a workshop in a school or community group to get people involved (this could be music, art, craft, exercise, collecting memories, building bridges).
OR
Volunteer to share your skills or experience – if you have ever delivered an event, produced a gig, raised money, done a risk assessment, and would like to help, let us know.
If you are interested please email members of the Leys community at leyscommunityevent@gmail.com with your name, contact details and just tell us what you would like to do.
4. Get your school involved
This year the Leys Festival is excited to offer local schools the opportunity to book one of the following free workshops for young people.
Workshop Options
1. Build the Ultimate Leys Festival (KS1, KS2, KS3)
Get hands-on and work with a professional facilitator to design and construct a 3D model
of your own ideal festival and exhibit your final work at the Leys Festival!
2. Film Your Utopia (KS3 and KS4)
Explore the concept of Utopia in your own community– What makes us hopeful? What do we do every day that makes our world a little better? What else could we do? Who are your everyday heroes? Work with professional artists to create short films using your smartphone. Learn about filming techniques, visual storytelling and creative expression through digital media!
3. Creative Writing (KS1, KS2, KS3 and KS4)
Work with professional artists to explore techniques for writing, stories, poems, songs, and spoken word around our festival themes; One People One Place, Building Bridges. Take inspiration from local writers and musicians and participate in guided writing exercises to get the ideas flowing, with the opportunity to perform your own work!
4. Write a song for the Leys (KS1, KS2, KS3 and KS4)
Explore songwriting with professional musicians and collaborate with other schools and community groups on song ideas. Join the Leys Festival Choir to rehearse and sing our new song at the Festival (optional!)
If you would like more information or to express your interest in taking part in one or more of the above workshops, please email leyscommunityevent@gmail.com. Please note all expressions of interest need to be submitted by Wednesday 30th April 2025.
join in
Steering meetings take place at 6-8pm, all welcome:
- Thursday 10th April at Oxford Hub, Windale Primary School, Windale Avenue, Oxford OX4 6JD
- Thursday 1st May, Activate Learning
- Thursday 15th May, Activate Learning
- Thursday 29th May, Location tbc
- Thursday 12th June, Activate Learning
- Thursday 26th June, Activate Learning
- Thursday 3rd July, Activate Learning
Ahead of a special evening performance this March, in which Oxford schoolchildren will bring their visions of an ideal town to life through original music and theatre, Giles Masters (Fellow, Magdalen College) delves into the inspiration behind the project and highlights the essential role of play in learning and development. This behind-the-scenes look at the collaboration between researchers and primary school students explores the influence of music and theatre experiment, Wir Bauen Eine Stadt (1930), and its relevance for children today.
Red light! Green light! Motorway! Four eight-year-olds are telling me how you play a game called ‘Cars’. (Initially, there’s some debate about whether the name is actually ‘Beans’, but on reflection we decide this is unlikely.) Folded into a tiny red plastic chair – an adult guest in their primary school classroom – I learn that the game, which they play in PE, involves responding to verbal prompts from a leader or teacher. ‘Green light!’ means go; ‘red light!’ means stop. ‘Tow truck!’ means find a partner and hold their hand. ‘Mini car!’ means shuffle along with your knees bent in a kind of squat. (Children find this easier than grown-ups.) And if you hear ‘motorway!’, run as fast as you can. The game ends with ‘park!’: everyone sits down. For the children, recalling and demonstrating each of these actions quickly becomes its own kind of game: a game about the power of memory, about the satisfaction of communicating something important to an ignorant adult (who doesn’t know ‘Cars’?), and about the almost unbearable question of how long they’ll have to wait before they play the real thing again.
This isn’t what I usually get up to in my job. As a music historian, I’m most often to be found in an archive or library somewhere or teaching young adults and marking their essays. In the project that brought me into this primary school classroom, those familiar ways of thinking about knowledge and learning in a university humanities department remain essential. But the aim is to put them to more creative, experimental ends, involving a much bigger, more varied team of collaborators and a lot more running around pretending to be cars.
On behalf of Music at Oxford, with kind permission of Schott Music, Mainz, Germany.
The project, Let’s Build a Town!, began in summer 2023, when I took the initial germ of an idea to Felicity Newby-Smith, who runs the Learning and Participation programme for Music at Oxford, a local arts organisation. The starting point was my research into Wir bauen eine Stadt (Let’s Build a Town) by the German composer Paul Hindemith. In summer 1931, this short, recently composed experiment in music theatre was performed by British schoolchildren in Oxford’s Holywell Music Room. This fascinating, basically unknown historical event sparked us to think about how the piece might be revived and reimagined in Oxford today.
We found two aspects of Wir bauen eine Stadt especially inspiring. First, the work invites children to imagine a city where there are no adults and they are in charge. This classic scenario (explored most famously, and disturbingly, in English-language literature in William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies) is presented optimistically here as a kind of urban utopia. During the piece, the children think about the different kinds of infrastructure that make up a city, such as transport. They imagine what kinds of roles they might take up in this new society. (We’ll still need a dentist.) And they teach us about the importance of working together to get things done. Today, in Oxford and across the country, debates around urban planning, citizenship, and belonging are urgent and often highly divisive. In this context, Wir bauen eine Stadt offers rich opportunities for young people to develop and express their views on local history, geography, and politics, and to foreground their voices, so easily ignored, in renewed and less polarised public discussions on these themes. How do children in twenty-first-century Oxford think about their city, we wondered, and if they were in charge, what kind of place and community would they want to live in? After all, they are the ones who will have to live with the decisions we make today.
Second, Wir bauen eine Stadt is suffused with the belief, widespread among progressive-minded artists and teachers of Hindemith’s generation, that games and play are essential to fostering children’s learning, social development, and enjoyment of the arts. That belief makes a refreshing contrast with the narrow views of education that have squeezed the space for creativity and performance in UK school curricula over the past decade or so. Hindemith’s main collaborator, a writer called Robert Seitz, came up with material for Wir bauen eine Stadt by observing playground games that early twentieth-century German children played of their own accord and translating these into corresponding dramatic situations (so we get, for example, a night-time caper involving cops and robbers). Felicity and I wanted to explore what might happen if we took this ethos one step further: that is, if instead of simply harvesting ideas from children’s games (and then retreating to the risk-averse territory of getting children to learn words and music written by adults), we made play a more integral part of the creative process and performance. With this aim in mind, we devised a project in which young people would be empowered to build and perform a new, more genuinely playful, version of Hindemith’s ‘town’, in which scenes from the original work would be interwoven with new co-created music and theatre exploring the same themes from the twenty-first-century perspectives of the children taking part.
In late 2023, the project was awarded incubation funding from the Cultural Programme. This support enabled us to organise two developmental workshop days in July and September 2024 at St Francis CofE Primary School in east Oxford. (St Francis, our main partner school, has an existing link with the Outreach and Access Team at Magdalen College, where I am a Fellow by Examination.)
We were lucky to have a brilliant team of artists and workshop leaders: Emma-Jane Greig (movement), Oliver Grant (theatre), Tabitha Grove (design), Tim Keasley (music lead), Rose Martin (music/singing coach), Anna Pool (director), Lauren Spiceley (music/instrumentalist), and Natalie Wong (movement). The team was completed by Dr Lucy Hunt, who led evaluation of the incubation period, with support from Erin Townsend (a third-year undergraduate music student).
During the workshop days, we split our time between developing ideas as a project team and working directly with young people in Years 4 and 5 (aged 8–10). We focused especially on collecting different kinds of games, drawing on the collective knowledge of the children and grown-ups, and thinking about how they might be used or adapted for the project. We also worked with some of the children to try out new games we had just invented and to draw a big collective map of their ideal town. In July we led a whole-school singing assembly, and in September we taught both classes we’re working with one of the songs by Hindemith. At the end of the assembly, the St Francis community gave us a very special surprise, singing ‘The Trees of the Fields Will Clap Their Hands’, one of their favourite songs, just for us.
Working with games and play raised a host of fascinating questions, philosophical and practical. What do these terms actually mean? Can we draw a clear boundary between them? And how might we categorise the myriad activities they refer to? One helpful parameter was structure: how much what an individual does is governed by rules. At one end of this scale, we might put organised sports and certain board games. At the other, there are freer activities that rely more on the imagination (such as ‘Playing House’). Many games fall between these extremes. Other parameters and categories that seemed important included the number of players, the presence or absence of a leader figure (like in ‘Cars’), and the amount of energy and physical exertion required (an important consideration when planning workshops with primary school children!). We also tracked the continuities and changes between the games the young people talked about enjoying, the ones we remembered from our own childhoods, and the ones that feature in Hindemith’s piece. We learnt, for instance, that these children still play ‘Grandmother’s Footsteps’ – but, disconcertingly, they call it ‘Squid Game’. In the playground, word-of-mouth knowledge and popular culture are constantly colliding in new ways.
What has been most rewarding, after many months of planning, has been to start collaborating with the children in meaningful and even inspiring ways. As the Year 4 class teacher wrote to us after the September workshop, ‘The children’s engagement has been incredibly high due to the wealth of skills and enthusiasm of the adults involved as well as the carefully thought-out activities. The sessions have been accessible for all children, and it has been great to see positive engagement from those who may not usually see performing or music as “their thing”. Children were left with an excited buzz about the project.’ A town worth living in can’t be built in a day. But during this first phase of the project, we’ve worked hard to lay down the best foundations we can. We look forward to sharing more updates with you, and we hope you can join us for the final performance in March!
‘Let’s Build a Town’ is produced by Music at Oxford in collaboration with The University of Oxford’s Cultural Programme, and with the support of the Faculty of Music, Magdalen College, RETUNE Festival and the Marchus Trust.
Join Giles Masters and members of the artistic team on 5th March for a unique opportunity to explore the research and creative work behind the project at a pre-concert discussion and workshop. Tickets are free and available now from Florence Park Talks.
Enjoy original music and theatre created as part of the project on 14th March – a new town will be imagined and built before your eyes and ears! Find out more about the ‘Let’s Build a Town‘ evening concert. – tickets are available now.