Music and Drama
The school considers music to play a vital role in the cultural life of the school.
Musical ensembles range from those for more advanced players (including Senior Orchestra, Chamber Ensemble, and Wind Band) to a range of smaller ensembles catering for every instrumentalist. There is a Senior Choir and a Junior Choir (which combine for school events to form an ensemble of up to 90 singers) as well as a Chamber Choir. From September 2011, the Music Department will have three full-time staff and a team of fourteen peripatetic teachers (many of whom run and support ensembles). There are concerts and performances throughout the year, including events held jointly with Wallington High School for Girls. Beyond musics lessons before GCSE preparation, there is no requirement to take part in these activities
There is generally one senior drama production per year, produced under the company name Shock Tactics. This goes back to 1997 when the then Headmaster bowed to pressure from a small number of parents who objected to the play ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore by John Ford being produced in school; the production team responded to the ban by taking the show out to a local theatre and performing not as Wilson’s School but as ‘Shock Tactics’. The following year at the same theatre they presented Ghetto by Joshua Sobol. Since then, productions have returned to the school, but the Shock Tactics moniker has remained.
Collaboration between Music and Drama departments has yielded a range of productions involving junior students in recent years (including musical versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet in early 2010). A senior musical production of High Society took place in December 2011, and a performance of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in Spring 2012 which included the return of Wilson's Shock Tactics and its more controversial edge. In Winter 2012, the Upper School put on The Madness of King George by Alan Bennett. The Spring 2013 Production has ben announced to be a Shock Tactics performance of Twelfth Night
Every seven or so years the staff perform in a full-scale Christmas pantomime. The last one was Sinbad the Sailor in 2009.
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Famous quotes containing the words music and, music and/or drama:
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)
“I’ve come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I’ve never got there.... I’m always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.”
—Miles Davis (1926–1991)
“To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air: the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.”
—Eleonora Duse (1858–1924)