Art & Culture

The Art & Culture Development Project focuses on bringing Roma arts closer to the mainstream art landscape in the UK.

Roma Bridging Sounds Orchestra

We launched The Roma Bridging Sounds Orchestra in 2014. This is a pioneering music initiative aiming to promote tolerance and combat anti-Roma prejudice by enhancing awareness of Roma music heritage in East London and beyond.

See our video about the orchestra:

The Project builds bridges between Roma and non-Roma: young musicians, professional musicians and audiences and is delivered in collaboration with our partners, e.g. Newham Academy of Music, Newham Music Hub, Grand Union Youth Orchestra, etc.

The Roma Bridging Sounds Orchestra engages children and young people from age 8 to 25.

Tania Gessi, Art Project Coordinator, explains more about the project below and you can read about how the project is making a difference in this article published in the Guardian and these articles in the Newham Recorder.

We’ve been running music classes for a long time, with experienced adult Roma musicians teaching and mentoring Roma children. This has been a great success – with performances and a recorded CD. But we want to move beyond that. We want to open up the Roma Youth Orchestra to non-Roma as well, and to challenge the notion of what passes for ‘Gypsy music’ being seen as authentic Roma music.

Roma musicians have always developed and adapted. The vast distances travelled introduced a multitude of influences in Roma music, starting with Indian roots and adding elements of Greek, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Balkan, Russian, Spanish origin, resulting in a real mix of different musical styles. We think that young Roma will want to adapt and see where fusion and cohesion takes us; East London meets …Budapest?

Public performances are something that we expect, as well as the development of individual talent and creativity. And a chance for young people to work with others who they might not usually encounter; a chance to learn differently…

The orchestra rehearsals are free and take place at the Chobham Academy, Stratford. Funding from the Arts Council England and Rayne Foundation has ensured that the programme will last for two years.

In 2014 the Roma Support Group commissioned Sound Connections to produce an Evaluation Report on the progress of the Bridging Sounds Project.

For further details please contact us on 07949 089 778 or email: sylvia@romasupportgroup.org.uk.

See photos of the orchestra on our Flickr pages.

Orchestral transcriptions

Here are transcriptions of some of the pieces played by the Roma Bridging Sounds Orchestra (in pdf format). These scores are the result of a collaboration between the non-Roma teachers from the Newham Academy of Music and our Roma tutors. The aim of this is so that people can easily download them and use them. We hope this will help popularise Roma music as played by Roma musicians!

Watch this space as there will be more pieces of new and exciting music.