VQCreate

When the pandemic hit, we wanted to have greater agency over delivering our education programmes online, especially when it came to working with schools & students. Lockdown didn’t allow us to meet in person with schools, so we had to think outside the box.

With the help of the RPS Enterprise Fund grant which we were awarded last year, supported by the Harriet’s Trust, we worked on making #VQCreate, an interactive online resource for students to learn about string quartet composition. The project helped us stay creatively engaged with our students during the pandemic. It also gave our education work a new dimension by creating a platform where students could watch, learn about, and engage with string quartet composition online.

During our journey in this project, we were also fortunate to be supported by Dr. Elizabeth Kelly from the Music Department at the University of Nottingham, who connected us to the Mixed Reality Lab. We also worked with the design agency Turbine Creative to help create our content for the site. Our collaborators helped refine our vision and pushed us to think differently on how music could be taught online. Together we figured out – and are still refining – ways to share engaging material with teenagers about composition online through an app that could be accessed on mobile phones and tablets.

Here are some examples of the interactive elements we incorporated into the app protoype. Students were able to access various resource links, which demonstrated musical elements or string techniques:

At the beginning of 2022, we embarked on a pilot run of this prototype and tested the app during a 6-month composition project with four secondary schools in the Nottinghamshire area. The students referred to the app throughout the project, and they wrote new compositions for us. We performed their works last month (July 2022) live at the Nottingham Chamber Music Festival.

With this project, we learned the importance of collaboration with people outside our field – the depth of knowledge from the programmers, developers, and designers we worked with helped us think differently. This project has also reinforced our relationships with schools and helped us explore how we can engage more deeply with students online. It has been a deep and fulfilling project for us, to create a new platform for young people to engage with us in string quartet and composition.

We are grateful to the RPS Fund, Harriet’s Trust, the Mixed Reality Lab at Nottingham University, Turbine Creative, and Dr. Elizabeth Kelly for helping us to achieve this vision.