Bringing light, mainly danceable music, to wider audiences by emulating the look, feel and sound of an orchestra such as would have played at the original “peoples palaces” (Alexandra & Crystal Palaces), grand hotel palm courts, park bandstands and cruise liners, between the 1850s and 1930s.

The previous sentence is a first stab at a mission statement for a “Crystal Palace Orchestra”, building on the Crystal Palace Quartet name that we have used for over thirteen years, primarily to provide background music for a wide variety of events, but also to put on our own concerts, play for recording and TV sessions, and perform recitals on cruise ships among other varied and fun activities. If this interests you please read on…

The plan

So far the plan is more or less as follows:

1. Decide on how the organisation will be structured, e.g sole ownership, partnership, limited company, educational charity etc.
2. Decide who will take on the key organisational and artistic leadership roles. For example, do we want to have a named band leader and/or section leaders?
3. Research the music that would have been played at the palaces and at hotels, bandstands and other venues, starting say from 1851 up to when the Crystal Palace burned down (1936), as a randomly selected end point.
4. Locate and/or create some suitable arrangements for both small and medium forces. “Small” might mean one to four violins, one or two violas, cello & bass, plus optionally piano & drum kit, and “medium” might add a wind quintet, trumpet and even accordion to the mix. There’s no need to actually specify scoring at this stage, so why not just say that CPO starts as a five-piece and can be as big as a modern chamber, or even symphony, orchestra as required.
5. Build website and set up administration system(s) for quoting, contracting, booking, touring etc.
6. Research and obtain appropriate concert dress for photoshoot & video
7. Research how the music would have been performed at the time, e.g. instrument types & setups, use of vibrato, portamento, embellishments etc.
8. Distribute parts, practice and rehearse together in varying formations to find out (among other things) what works best at various size points.
9. Record audio & video of a few numbers
10. Publish recordings and photos of various size groups, e.g. at an outdoor bandstand, a hotel palm court (Langham, Sheraton?) and/or conservatory (Kew, Barbican?), as cost and permissions allow
11. Get ALL the gigs
12. Profit! Hah.

Starting a discussion

All of your ideas are welcome, and an expression of interest of getting involved at this early stage would be really useful, as it will take some investment of time, resources (and possibly money) to get the idea off the ground.

I’m looking forward to carrying on this discussion and moving forward with the project in the very near future. Please add your comments via this website, or via email if you wish it to remain private.

Chris Brody
info@lundonia.uk
+44 (0)20 3369 5863

References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_court
http://www.palmcourtorchestra.com/history.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Palace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_zPqkCLM7Y

Last updated 2018-08-31 11:42