Produced by Music at Oxford and the Cultural Programme at the University of Oxford, with support from the Faculty of Music, Magdalen College and the Marchus Trust.
In 1931, Hindemith's opera Let's Build A Town, inviting schoolchildren to imagine a city where there are no adults and they are in charge, was performed by local children in Oxford’s Holywell Music Room. In March 2025, young people from Oxford will restage scenes from the same piece, interspersed with new co-created music and theatre exploring what they think it means to build a town today. This project is the culmination of months of collaboration between Music at Oxford, St Francis CofE Primary School, Oxford Spires Academy and the University of Oxford, truly multidisciplinary in every sense of the word. Highlighting not just an underperformed work, Let's Build A Town also features the contributions of childrens' voices from a local state school, challenging parameters of socioeconomic disadvantage often found in music - especially 'classical', and suggesting an alternative way to create art which involves many voices including those of children.