Words by Emma Warren

In the beginning, there were four kids. Now there are over 350 young musicians rehearsing four times a week with the ensemble-based youth music programme Nucleo. It was started by conductor and violinist Lucy Maguire in 2013 after she spent a year working with the famous El Sistema programme in Venezuela. Nucleo has recently taken over the instrument donation bank and Young Leaders programme previously run by the now-defunct Sistema England. 

Maguire believes that Nucleo’s focus on collective music-making is a key part of their social success, noting that no one individual can do the work of an ensemble and that no ensemble can function without individuals. “I think that’s an important part of the lesson about community, mutual care, responsibility, teamwork, and society. It’s a mini-community, a mini-society where everybody has to contribute something.” The musical successes are impressive, too, with multiple children passing ABRSM examinations at distinction level and 15 students who have studied or are studying at the Royal College of Music on their Future Talent programmes.

The focus is musically broad. “We try not to think of this music over here and that music over there,” she says. “Our main ensemble unit is an orchestra but we’ll play anything really.” This often involves a medley of mambos by Perez Prado or an orchestral arrangement of Stand By Me which Maguire wrote for the orchestra in the early days. “It’s multi-level so all the kids can join in. For the little ones, there’s a lot of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and other folk songs.” 

At the moment, they’re doing school ensemble arrangements of film scores, including a reading project with the seniors designed to build up their ability to learn new pieces really quickly. This might include a Harry Potter medley, the Beauty and the Beast theme, music from Pirates of the Caribbean or ‘a really good one’ for the little ones – The Muppet Show theme tune.

“Sometimes the kids are saying ‘we are an orchestra – are we not going to play some classical music?’,” she adds. “As adults we think something has been done a million times, but the kids haven’t done it a million times and they’re waiting for it to be their turn.”

The young musicians at Nucleo speak 40 different languages, which is unsurprising given that 80% of their children are members of the global majority populations. Almost half are living in the lowest 20% measured by the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index. The project, which is free for children to use, began life in a flat two minutes from Grenfell and they had seven children living in the tower when the fire broke out in 2017. The children and their families survived, but they’ve all had to leave the project for a variety of reasons, including some being re-homed too far away to continue attending. “Every kid at Nucleo was impacted,” says Maguire. “A lot of our kids were looking out their windows watching a building burn down. It’s a major event that’s had an effect on everyone in our community.”

Another local charity, OneVibe, made a tune for the recent fifth anniversary of the disaster. The Toddla T-produced release is an uptempo and unceasingly positive tune titled West Side Story, and it features local artists, musicians from the Mangrove Steel Band – alongside two young violinists, a flautist and a trumpet player from Nucleo. It was the first time the musicians had done anything similar. The process was ‘exciting’ said trumpeter Lucas. “As well as recording what Toddla expected, he also let me improvise in the studio and then added that bit into the song.” Violinist Joshua has been a student and teacher at Nucleo for nine years and played backing melodies on the song. “Nucleo is really valuable,” he says. “It equips young people with music to give them opportunities they probably wouldn’t have access to.”

Access to music has been diminished after a decade of austerity, the pandemic, and ideological changes to education that have seen music squeezed out of many schools. The cost of living makes it hard for parents to pay for music lessons, and the royalty collection society PRS’s recent and inexplicable decision to cut their Foundation fund for young musicians by 60%  is just more bad icing on the cake. 

Nucleo’s National Instrument Donation Bank is a tiny but important contribution to the multiple deficits. Sometimes they give an instrument directly to a child, other times donating it to an organisation or school so that they can be sure it’ll continue to be used. They recently received a notable donation in the shape of a harp, along with donor-funded lessons for the next couple of years. “That was a dream donation,” says Maguire, “and now we have two little harpists at Nucleo and they love it. I never thought it was realistic that we’d have harpists but now we do.”

The project continues to grow through word of mouth – there’s no marketing – and they’ll be running the first National Young Leaders camp of the year in the autumn, aimed at members of their ‘music for social action’ community with a great musical skill matched by leadership potential and a desire to spread social change. 

Communities come together around their young people, says Lucy Maguire. “It’s really cool when kids can do something that their grown-ups don’t already know how to do. It shows everyone that although they're still children, and need to be nurtured and protected within their family and community, they also have a lot to contribute,” she says. “Not just when they grow up, but right now! They are already powerful, and they're here to build the future.”