Enriching and transforming the lives of young people through music making
HMDT Music, twice winner of the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Education and winner of the Excellence in Music Theatre Award is a leader in creating inspiring projects for young people, particularly those facing challenging experiences, through which it aims to enrich learning, broaden awareness of and help fight inequity and transform lives.
Working with expert practitioners and artists, HMDT Music increases access to musical experiences to develop skills, raise aspiration and support self-expression and creativity through resources, mentoring, workshops, teaching, partnerships and performance commissions. Our mission is to use the arts to explore and fight injustice and inequity, particularly for communities facing discrimination and deprivation, through our focus on using historical exploration of marginalised voices to bring about change.
Established in 1995 originally to work in Hackney, HMDT Music has grown into a highly respected national charity working in several areas across England.
Our core areas of work are:
One Spirit is an Intervention, Resettlement and Restorative programme, using music and creative arts, to help support and transform the lives of the most vulnerable young people in our community, who are at risk of and/or already embroiled in the criminal justice system and consistently facing systematic discrimination and racial inequity.
Explore One Spirit
HMDT Music’s Saturday Programme serves over 350 students aged 6 months – 25 years on 30 Saturdays during each academic year. Started in 1995, it remains a vibrant and unique Saturday offering, providing a spectrum of individual projects involving guest visits and work with leading artists, alongside the continually expanding regular classes and programmes designed to enrich the lives of young people through music making. A source of local community pride, the programme also attracts students from across London and beyond.
The Saturday Programme includes The Music Box (under 5s programme), The Fledglings (for reception age students), I Can Sing! (Music Theatre Programme), CYMH Instrumental School, The Julian Joseph Jazz Academy and Music Treehouse (SEN/D Programme),.
The programme is supported by an extensive Bursary programme which supports students in financial need.
Explore The Saturday Programme
For over 25 years, HMDT Music has been creating unique, award-winning projects for schools since 1995. These include thematic commissions of new works for young people to perform supported by arts-embedded cross-curricular teaching resources.
Our commissions include RPS Award winners On London Fields and Confucius Says, as well as STEM Sisters, Hear Our Voice, Shadowball, The Brown Bomber, The Hackney Chronicles, The World Was All Before Them, and 2020 Music and Drama Education Award Winner Trench Brothers.
Our other work in schools includes cross-curricular projects embedding the arts across all learning such as TIME and the E Project which also underpins EDI, as well as bespoke workshops and projects, a and a wealth of education materials, all of which use the arts across the curriculum to enrich learning.
Explore In Schools
HMDT Music, twice winner of the prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Education and winner of the Excellence in Music Theatre Award is a leader in creating inspiring projects for young people, particularly those facing challenging experiences, through which it aims to enrich learning, broaden awareness of and help fight inequity and transform lives.
