Education Projects

Leanne is passionate about music education and unlocking young people’s creativity. She has written music in workshop settings with a range of organisations including ENO Baylis (with whom she also conducted a youth project performance of the devised piece London Rise at the London Coliseum), The Space Theatre, Mulberry School for Girls, and Spitalfields Music.

We Didn’t Know - #ELFTin1Voice

In 2020-21 Leanne worked with staff and service users from the East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT), along with music therapist Polly Bowler, to write a song through a series of online workshops. The co-created piece, We Didn’t Know, was launched in October 2021, along with a short film reflecting on the making of the song and its significance for those involved. Watch the song’s virtual choir video above, or check out the full 15-minute launch event on YouTube.

Isolation, In Your Words

Isolation, In Your Words is a musical documentary about life in lockdown, co-written by Leanne and collaborators Mandeep., Kevin Fox and Zar, as part of BBC Culture in Quarantine. The project uses lyrical storytelling and verbatim techniques to blur the line between songwriting and social research. It premiered on BBC Radio 3 in October 2020, and is available on Spotify.

New Musical Theatre

Leanne wrote and performed In The Middle as part of On Hope: A Digital Song Cycle, online at The Other Palace (2020). She has a particular interest in verbatim theatre techniques in songwriting as a means of tapping into the musicality of everyday speech and finding the beauty in everyday words, voices and stories. Her piece This Is Marc took this approach, written as a rapid response to the week’s news for NEWSFEED at the Southwark Playhouse (2019). Verbatim work also features heavily in Isolation, In Your Words (2020, BBC Radio 3).

Vocal Painting

Vocal Painting (VOPA) is a sign language for creating music in the moment, bringing compositional form to improvised music, and flexibility to established music. Leanne uses VOPA as a songwriting tool, as a means of developing singers’ musicianship, and to create sections of improvised music live in performance (e.g., See Me As I Am, a collaboration with rapper/doctor Mandeep Singh). Below is an example of a piece created entirely in the moment using VOPA, composed collaboratively in a live performance setting by Leanne and the group.