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/or drama:
“Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
Yet slower yet, oh faintly gentle springs:
List to the heavy part the music bears,
“Woe weeps out her division when she sings.”
Droop herbs and flowers;
Fall grief in showers;
“Our beauties are not ours”:
Oh, I could still,
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill,
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature’s pride is, now, a withered daffodil.”
—Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
“Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, griefs, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations—all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.”
—Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881)