Chameleon
RPS Henderson Chamber Ensemble Award | £2,500
Chameleon are a prize-winning, versatile woodwind ensemble with a mission to create, empower, and share music with audiences far and wide. Their performances feature an impressive array of up to 13 woodwind instruments split between only four members, with the quartet seamlessly transitioning between them to showcase the diversity of the woodwind family.
Cara Houghton, Sarah Austen, Jessica Tomlinson and Eleanor Mills deliver visually exciting, accessible performances that explore an array of sound worlds. They step outside of the conventions of classical music performance, by re-imagining a wide range of repertoire from various settings and exploring the relationship between memorisation and movement work, always putting audience experience at the heart of what they do.
Chameleon are Live Music Now artists specialising in SEND (special educational needs and disability) and primary school engagement, and are recipients of the Royal Philharmonic Society Enterprise Fund for 'Virtually Live', a concert series driven by a passion for connecting with their audience through conversation and interaction. Their performing and engagement projects work in tandem, with a firm belief that every piece of music can be understood and enjoyed by anyone.
Chameleon are thrilled to be recipients of the RPS Henderson Chamber Ensemble Award for 2023.
Over the next year, we will curate a new concert programme through an exploratory process of discovering and arranging new music and reimagining current repertoire. We will take our ideas on a summer tour, reaching new audiences as we continue to explore and develop our concert programme. The funding will allow us to continue our professional development by receiving coaching from a variety of musicians to further enhance our ensemble playing and doubling.
We will also commission a new piece that will be at the centre of our final programme to be premiered in Autumn 2024. The premiere will be the first performance of our new programme, launching the start of our 2024-25 season in which audiences will be taken on an immersive, musical journey with us. Towards the end of 2024, we will record our new pieces for an online audience.
Our performance and engagement work run in tandem, and we will also create educational resources from our newly curated programme to share in schools. We will create workshops and interactive concerts, or re-invigorate existing packages with our new repertoire, linking it to the programme for our concerts.