A Little Book of Monsters

Seven songs about monsters: ugly ones, sneaky ones, snobby ones, hungry ones and monsters that only exist on the inside. A Little Book of Monsters is by the celebrated team of Stephen Deazley (composer) and Matt Harvey (poet) and has been uniquely styled to appeal to young singers and to a family audience.

This songbook has been created for children aged 10-14 to be performed in large groups in one of two versions – with a professional ensemble or with a chamber orchestra. Love Music provides audio tracks of all the songs, lyric sheets, song sheets and vocal scores for teachers to use with their choirs, plus a professional development training session for all teachers and choir leaders involved in the project, and subsequent rehearsal sessions with Stephen Deazley in each school. On the performance day there is a final rehearsal with all the groups joining together to form one massed choir, alongside an ensemble of the highest quality professional musicians, followed by the performance. If you would like to perform A Little Book of Monsters with your school or choir, please get in touch.

The project is designed to inspire singing within schools and to support teachers in the delivery of exciting new opportunities and work for children. There are seven songs, and an eighth work for speaker, with a total performance duration of approximately 40 minutes. The recommended number of children involved in the project is between 120-180, although the piece can be performed with fewer participants. There are a number of complementary creative projects and cross-curricular activities that work very well alongside the performance project. Please get in touch for details.

This short film, made by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, shows what the Edinburgh Primary Schools thought of their Monster experience.

A Little Book of Monsters has been performed across the UK in collaboration with national and regional partners, venues, ensembles, orchestras and schools. Most recently, Opera North’s chamber orchestra performed the piece with 200 children in Hull, Hexham, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Doncaster and Ripon in June 2017.

This piece was commissioned by St Magnus International Festival, Deal Festival of Music and Arts, Down Arts Centre, The Sage Gateshead, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Welsh National Opera and was made possible with funding through Beyond Borders from the PRS for Music Foundation, Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Arts Council of Wales and Colwinston Trust.

Scostman Review ****
David Kettle, 11th Feb 2013

“These were imaginary fiends, conjured in listeners’ minds by poet Matt Harvey and composer Stephen Deazley in their highly effective choral song cycle A Little Book of Monsters, which formed the centre-piece of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s deliciously macabre family concert.

Deazley’s vivid, foot-tapping music ranged in style from Prokofiev to swing and funk, and the twisted tales that Harvey slipped into verse were gleefully dark. But it was the children’s choir who made the concert, brought together from nine local schools and impeccably drilled by their teachers and Deazley himself. Singing from memory and with ringing clarity, they could have taught many of their adult counterparts a thing or two as they merrily sang their stories of man-eating changing cubicles and cannibal creatures.

The SCO players, too, were on fine form… rising to Deazley’s intricate lines and wide-ranging styles with relish. The piece could probably have done with one or two fewer numbers, but the audience was nonetheless rapt throughout.”