Welcome to our Festival Page!
This year’s Hay Music Festival takes as its theme ‘The Healing Power of Music’.
Music has always been an important element in the experience of life, reflecting and adding to the range of human emotions. We are living in difficult times and our aim in planning this year’s Festival (our 11th!) was to present music that would lift the spirits of our audiences. We know the artists we have booked for this event are more than capable of doing this! We will also be reflecting on how music can actually contribute to the healing of real illnesses, with two world experts in the field, the Composer Nigel Osborne, who has brought music to many war zones from Bosnia to Ukraine and Professor Michael Trimble, a neuroscientist who has published widely on the healing power of music. There is something for everyone in this Festival so please join us.
Tickets: in addition to tickets for individual events there is also a ‘Weekend Saver’ ticket at £110.
Tickets may now be purchased in any combination for any of our concerts in one transaction via the universal link found with the details of each event.
Performances will take place in various venues around Hay-on-Wye including St Mary’s Church, The Globe at Hay and Hay Castle.
Hay Music Festival’s Outreach Programme
In addition to the events available to the general public, we are running a programme of outreach events. Composer and pianist Robert Peate will run a creative workshop with Selina Hamilton, violin, and Roz Gladstone, cello, at The Family Place. This organisation is a registered independent Adoption Support Service, providing specialist and flexible therapeutic interventions for children who have been impacted by early years trauma, and their families. This includes adoptive, kinship and foster care families and young people in residential settings. Their aim is to strengthen the relationships between children, young people and the adults caring for them by helping to deepen everyone’s understanding in a safe and therapeutic environment, involving the parents and carers who are the people who can help their children most. Centred on the theme of wellbeing, the musicians will work closely with the therapists to find different ways of helping the participants involved to interact in a meaningful way through the music, focussing on an arrangement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A minor Op. 132. As in previous workshops, this will likely involve a mixture of group and individual activities which combine listening, writing, movement, crafting, etc.
The Fitzwilliam Quartet will lead workshops for several local primary and secondary schools based on the works in the Quartet’s concert programmes. They will also give an informal and interactive performance to disabled adults including those with dementia and their carers at the HayDay Café in Clyro. Run by Sue Hodgetts and local volunteers, the Café has been providing a social centre for adults suffering from dementia for over ten years.