Jesus College Choir will be travelling to Mumbai this week to perform for and work with slum children as part of an ongoing project with the music outreach charity Songbound, which aims to change the lives of deprived Mumbai children through music.

This is a unique opportunity for Cambridge students to make a difference through their music-making.

Mark Williams

Cambridge is well known for the reputation of its choral music but this trip marks a departure from the international tours normally undertaken by college choirs.

During this tour the Choir will visit Worli and Kamathipura in Mumbai, and perform for children before leading workshops and teaching the children songs and singing techniques that the group hopes they will remember for the rest of their lives.

The visit will culminate with a joint concert with the children at blueFROG in the Zeba Center at 7.30pm on Sunday 24 March.

Their performances will include sacred and secular music from around the world.  Highlights will include sacred music by Rachmaninov, Bach and Britten plus folksong arrangements by Vaughan Williams and John Rutter.

With the children  they will perform a piece written in a live link-up at blueFROG between the Songbound Prerana Choir and the children at Goldsworth School. Together they wrote a magical song over weeks of Internet-based communication and performed it together. They will also be teaching English Songs, and performing and learning some Indian songs: Sawalee, Vande Mataram and the Hymn of San Franciscu Xaviera.

The Choir has been busy fundraising to support the work of Songbound in the run-up to the visit and have managed to provide enough funding for it to continue for another three years at least.

Mark Williams, Director of Music at Jesus College, observes: “This is a unique opportunity for Cambridge students to make a difference through their music-making.

“We can forget what an enormous privilege it is to live and work in the beautiful city of Cambridge, enjoying all its cultural riches, as we strive for academic and musical perfection, but for the children of the Mumbai slums, the opportunity to sing and work together towards a performance is something that is far from ordinary. 

“I hope that the experience will be a profoundly important and moving one for both them and the students involved.”

The ultimate goal of the project is to build up a relationship between the College and the choirs run by Songbound, with the hope that, one day, some of the children will be able to come to the UK to perform alongside Jesus College Choir.

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