MAKING NEW MUSIC
Mark Withers leads groups across all areas of the community in small and large scale creations. These pieces are not written by Mark, rather he brings together the ideas of all of those taking part to put together pieces that take both experienced musicians and newcomers into a new, exciting and shared musical form.
Boras with the Aix Festival brought together immigrant communities from Marseille with members of the LSO and was based on traditional lullabies from the Comoros Islands. Also for Aix, Ouvertures, with saxophonist Raphaël Imbert, combined brass bands, orchestras, choirs and a team of young professional musicians in an outdoor spectacular that opened the 2016 Festival while 1984-2024 celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Mediteranee bringing young artists together with participants from across the entire community.
With members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and school pupils from London and Oxford, Mark has built small and large scale pieces in Creation and Sleeping Sense, working alongside scientists from Oxford University.
Running annually from 2016 to 2019, Comp'ose saw Mark and the musicians of the Orchestre de Chambre de Paris have music created for them by participants from all walks of life in the Paris area.
In January 2020, the Orchestra de Chambre de Lausanne commissioned Mark to create film soundtracks with local school pupils to celebrate the Youth Winter Olympic Games.
Since 2018, Mark has worked alongside librettist Violaine Fournier and members of Choeur Accentus and Insula Orchestra to create a series of large scale community pieces for performance at La Seine Musicale. Inspiration for these works has included Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Beethoven's Fidelio.
2022/23 saw the creation of Odyssee zum Mond, a community opera with libretto divised by Mehrnousch Zaeri-Esfahani and performed by Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen with their local community. Mark went on to guide the creation of a parallel community opera in Bogota, Colombia with a team from the Centro Nacional de las Artes.
REmbrandt, created during 2025 with the LSO, LSO Create and the National Gallery used five Rembrandt paintings as the inspiration for new work that was performed at the National Gallery and in the Barbican.​​​
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"I have learnt so much from Mark, not least that music and science in parallel can inspire, excite and empower young minds in ways that can't be done if they are considered separately. His enthusiasm, creativity and humour inspire those around him." - Professor Russell Foster, CBE, FRSB, FMedSci, FRS.
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LSO CREATE CREATION
Like many groups of musicians, LSO Create had not been able to meet in person over the period of the Covid pandemic. Create Creation in 2022 gave us our first opportunity to work together again in person. Part of the celebrations of the Barbican Centre's 40th anniversary celebrations, Create Creation is based images from the Hubble Space Telescope and tells the story of the expansion of the universe as a companion piece to Haydn's biblical telling in The Creation.
FESTIVAL D'AIX. THE JUNIOR ORCHESTRA
The Junior Orchestra with members of the London Symphony Orchestra at the Festival d'Aix. This programme formed a part of the LSO's residence at the Aix Festival and was designed to bring creativity and the skills of some of the worlds finest orchestral musicians to young players at all levels, from beginners to advanced students.The orchestra rehearsed and performed specially commissioned arrangements of orchestral music from the Festival repertoire as well as creating its own new works, notably a series of scores for silent movies by the likes of Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton.
FRANKENSTEIN
Large scale community creations include Frankenstein with singers from Accentus and members of Insula Orchestra. This piece, made with librettist Violaine Fournier, brought together nearly 200 participants. They devised work together over a period of 9 months, leading to a performance of Frankenstein, an hour long oratorio for soloists, choir and orchestra in the magnificent auditorium of La Seine Musicale in May 2018.