Hamelin can be tackled in a number of different ways. The central premise of this idea is to take individual scenes and give them to different schools so that each group has a small part. The crowd scenes provide a great opportunity to introduce some younger children into the discipline of performance and the “rats” accompanying “ragazzi” offers a wonderful way to introduce the youngest members of your school to music because for these parts, the tone and pitch are less important than the rhythm and feel for the sense of intimidation the rats engender. Experience over many years has shown that by rehearsing separately in this way, when the schools come together for the performance the different musical parts integrate fairly seamlessly. This allows the more complicated quadlibet songs to be performed effectively and gives the pupils practical experience of part singing. Clearly in larger schools, the same effect could be achieved by allocating scenes to different classes.

A single narrator can be used to read the Browning extracts but different narrators can also be used for each scene and even groups speaking in the style of a Greek chorus if wanted. The narrator(s) do not necessarily have to learn their lines by heart. They could well read them from a specially prepared book, scroll or other form of crib sheet (National Year of Reading!!). Main characters can also be changed. There is no reason for the Mayor to be the same person throughout the performance; a politics lesson here, as in real life the Mayor of a town or city changes fairly regularly. Naturally a single person taking a part for the whole of the production is also an option. The Piper’s tunes can be changed to a favourite recorder solo of the children’s own choice this is after all a live performance; or an appropriate recording which again the school(s) agree on. Appropriate examples could include the opening flute solo from Daphnis and Chloe (Ravel); Morning from Peer Gynt (Greig); Any of the many “Pan Pipe compilations.” to entice the children away.

If a single school wished to take this piece on, the choir will need to be divided up into at least two parts and the finale does not have to use all three tunes at the same time. There is ample opportunity for personalising this production by either identifying individual soloists or changing the groupings to suit individual circumstances. The opportunity to develop interesting dance sequences for the rats and children is something which also provides considerable additional scope and will impact on the length of time the production takes.

We have kept the story very much in line with the original Browning Poem and therefore some parts of the poem could easily be added or those already in the play removed to suit the production. Most importantly this is meant to be fun. The Children will enjoy the music and the challenge of some of the language. The staff involved should also enjoy the whole experience for not only does Hamelin provide a performance opportunity, the creative writing and many aspects of “Excellence and Enjoyment can naturally develop out of this stimulus.