OSL toured from West to East Sussex in June and July 2025 with its project From Felpham to Beachy Head, music, landscape, people, poetry, funded by Arts Council England. 

Charlotte Smith's epic poem Beachy Head (1803-1806) combines images of the iconic South Downs with reflections on big themes such as nature's power, human conflict, borders, individual courage, climate and change, memories of times past, and peace and reconciliation.  

Inspired by this extraordinary poem, OSL developed place-based, interdisciplinary creative music and song-writing methods and approaches through a new project with young people in Sussex schools, mainly aged 14 to 15. It aimed to use song-writing, drama and dance to show how big themes in Charlotte Smith's visionary poem are relevant to young people's voices today.  

Duncan Mackrill developed resources for teachers and students in advance of the sessions which identified themes in Smith's poems and suggested starting points for response (in music, dance and film). Ed Hughes developed compositional resources which were also shared in advance, in the form of a playable and adaptable music sequence, made available in notation, midi and audio formats, broadly reflecting the journey of the poem as a kind of template for composing. 

An introduction at each school set out aims of the project and set initial targets. A workshop at each school, led by opera director and theatre maker Freya Wynn-Jones, built a sense of company and expressive agency through inclusive games of rhythm and movement, in response to the poem's themes, and focused students into small groups to begin mapping their composition and/or dance piece.  

At each of the four schools (Felpham, Ifield, Varndean, Ratton) the work concluded with a bespoke performance day, supported by six professional musicians from the Orchestra of Sound and Light, at which students finalised (or devised) and performed their own compositions and choreography, accompanied by visual images, in response to the Beachy Head poem. A sense of a journey through the poem was a common feature in each of the four performances. Audiences were enthusiastic. Feedback from students on their experiences was collected, and demonstrated significant benefits (see below). 

The final performance in the tour took place at Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, on 13 July 2025, and included performances of songs about the experience of the South Downs, by Shirley J. Thompson, Rowland Sutherland, Evelyn Ficarra and Ed Hughes, alongside music co-created with the students accompanying a film of dance students from two schools (Ratton, Felpham). The work of young people in four schools, in West Sussex and East Sussex, was thus central to the tour's performances.