Our Business Partners

Dorico from Steinberg is a music notation and composition application first launched in 2016. It is one of the leading professional music notation programs and is available for macOS, Windows and iPad. Dorico is known for its stability, reliability and intuitive interface. At National Youth Choir, we appreciate it for its ability to handle choral scoring.

This partnership originated with Lillie Harris, who took part in our inaugural year-long development programme for emerging composers in 2019. Lillie was already working at Steinberg as the author of Dorico’s documentation, and after completing the programme at National Youth Choir introduced the two organisations to each other. We are incredibly grateful for our ongoing friendship with Lillie and her colleagues at Dorico, and the fantastic partnership that we have built together.

Dorico is key to the success of our emerging professional artist programme, providing software licenses to those taking part each year. With their support, we have commissioned many new choral works scored on Dorico, placing both organisations at the cutting edge of new music in the UK.

A notable upholder of English choral music, the North-London based publisher Stainer & Bell, independent since its foundation in 1907, is an ideal creative partner for the National Youth Choir and the quartet of composers of promise and flair selected annually for its Young Composers Fellowship. The pages of S&B’s catalogue are a treasury of landmark scores from a millennium of British musical history, offering beloved works by Coleridge-Taylor, Dyson, Elgar, Holst, Howells, Ireland, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and S.S. Wesley. There are exemplary editions of earlier masters such as Dunstable, Tallis, Byrd and Purcell and, from the remotest musical past, authoritative texts of the first Saxon and Norman notations on these shores, as featured in the Musica Britannica and Early English Church Music series.

For our four emerging composers encountering this unique blend of tradition and innovation through review of their scores created for the NYC choirs, the chance to learn from the expertise of a leading publisher in disciplines of editing, notation, origination and presentation, plus a holistic view of broader professional horizons, is a perfect complement to the practical skills acquired from their other commitments over the year. In many cases, too, the young composers’ work has been added to S&B’s cutting-edge digital series Choral Now. Works by former NYC fellows including Kristina Arakelyan, Millicent B. James and Cameron Biles-Liddell may be found there alongside titles by leading choral composers including Richard Allain, Ronald Corp, Iain Farrington, Russell Hepplewhite, Thomas Hewitt Jones and Rhian Samuel. Showcasing the best of young British is therefore an all-round win-win, adding a fresh new strand of young achievement to the ever-expanding series, in a perfect example of mutual commitment and co-operation between organisations vital to the continued wellbeing of musical life in the UK.

ABRSM is a global music education charity offering face-to-face and digital exams, sheet music, recordings, apps and courses for students and teachers across the world. As a charity, ABRSM supports music education both in the UK and around the world through an extensive programme of donations, scholarships, grants, partnerships, research and advocacy.

National Youth Choir and ABRSM have a longstanding partnership that centres around support for the emerging choral leaders programme at National Youth Choir. We also collaborate on our composer mentoring programmes, delivering joint training sessions for participants from both organisations each year. ABRSM’s partnership has been vital to the success of our emerging professional artist and community programmes over several years, for which we are incredibly grateful.

National Youth Choir Trustee Georgina Robb also serves as a Trustee of the ABRSM.