Working with voices
Martina is an associated member of the Natural Voice Network (NVN) and believes that singing is everybody’s birthright. She composes and arranges music for choirs and leads choral workshops, most recently with the Bloomsbury Festival 2025.
Composition/ arrangements
Martina has been commissioned to compose and arrange choral music for theatre productions, festivals and events. The Totally Thames Festival (Sing for Water 2017) included her composition ‘l’eau de l’eau‘. As part of the UCL Grand Challenges programme she was commissioned to write The Big Data Sing, a song cycle performed by a scratch choir at the Grant Museum of Zoology.
Martina’s choral compositions were also performed at RADA, the London Bubble Theatre and The New Factory of the Eccentric Actor. One of her songs, ‘The Evening Light’, features in the NVPN’s recent compilation This Room Sings.
Choirs and workshops
For over a decade, Martina has been a regular at Unicorn Voice Camp where she leads singing and the circle dance band. Hackney Song Works, a community choir which Martina led for about 10 years performed many of Martina’s compositions and arrangements. She has also been leading the Stapleton Hall Singers and the over-65 Palace Club singers at Chat’s Palace. Martina also led residential singing workshops such as The Wonderful Beast Singers, an enthusiastic amateur choir, culminating in a performance at the Old Walpole Chapel in Suffolk.
| To order choral or instrumental scores as PDFs as well as audio files with separate SATB recordings, please use the Donate button below. When paying, please write in the Note section which score(s)/ audios you are ordering as well as the email address you would like them sent to. You can also email Martina directly and pay using the donate button below. Martina will then send you the ordered scores/ audios. Suggested donation per piece £5. Thank you! |
Don’t Cut Down the Trees a cappella SATB taster, separate audio files for all parts & score/ lyrics can be ordered (see also accompanied version on Bandcamp below).
There is NO PLANet B!, a cappella SATB version, separate audio files for all parts & score/ lyrics can be ordered (see also accompanied version on Bandcamp below)
Martina’s choir arrangement of the Russian song ‘Vozle-Ryetshki’, sung by over 500 singers in 2016:
Live choral events – some highlights:
The Big Data Sing (2017): a song cycle commissioned by UCL Culture
“Throughout the evening, the Big Data Choir performed a number of big data related renditions, composed and conducted by Martina Schwarz, in the majestic Grant Museum of Zoology.
Songs about the opaque and mysterious nature of cloud storage solutions, and the ridiculous number of zeros associated with various units of data storage (yottabyte, anyone?) were among the most amusing hits, and provided a welcome respite from the mind-boggling topics being discussed… (“Big Data Sing” by Oliver Patel, UCL Culture 08/17)
‘L’eau de l’eau’ WaterAid (2017)
Vocal composition for mass choir, performed at the Totally Thames Festival Sing for Water (Water Aid)
- Remembrance Day(2021) at Abney Park Cemetery: Hackney Song Works joined forces with Hackney Voices singing peace songs from different traditions.
- ‘Music declares Emergency’, part of a mass choir singing ‘What a Wonderful World’ in Russell Square on 30th October 2021.
- Music@Clissold Hackney Song Works at the Old Church on 10th/11th July 2021
- “100 Choirs” at Kings Cross Station and @ Opificium at 119 Green Lanes, London.
- ‘Memorial‘ at the Barbican (2018): Alice Oswald’s poem ‘Memorial: An Excavation of the Iliad’ adapted for the stage by Australian company Brink Productions and featuring a score by Jocelyn Pook. Read more in The Citizen.
Listen to more on Youtube!