LMS - Live Music in Schools

LMS is a non-profit organisation established in 1992 and funded by the Danish Arts Council. Its aim is to offer high quality live music to schools all over Denmark. This is done through school concerts, classroom visits by musicians and composers and other activities, that give the pupils a deeper understanding of the professional music scene.

LMS also gathers and distributes information on school concerts and related topics, initiates experiments, develops new concepts in the field, arranges conferences and related activities.

Internationally LMS has established contacts in many European countries and co-operates on projects with other Scandinavian countries.

School Concerts
In Denmark LMS arrange about 2300 concerts a year with professional live music in schools.

The concerts provide a great cultural and musical experience and an approach to concrete learning. All kinds of music are presented and for each concert, LMS prepares some printed study material as well as audio examples on CD for use in the class before or after the concerts.

Each year in december a LMS-committee chooses new music groups and makes up a versatile tour-programme. The committee consists of five persons, all deeply rooted in their respective areas of music.

LMS is the national agency assuring constantly developing in the field. To make sure that the concerts reach the target group, a producer is attached to each project. This person collaborates closely with the musicians on the preparation and transmission of the concerts and composition of the study material. It is essential that the concerts accentuate the musicians' own images to assure the authencity of the music that the pupils experience.

Chameleon Concerts
Take your parents by the hand and have a concert experience together! This is the main idea behind the Chameleon Concerts, which have been well under way since 1995.

Throughout the years there have been concerts with many different bands and in very different genres. What these bands have in common is, that they play music of very high quality at children's level, that both swings and catches the audience.

All Chameleon Concerts are arranged at family-friendly times of the day on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, at venues in which the music is on familiar ground, with professional light and sound. It is still not a tradition in Denmark that children and parents go to concerts together, but we hope that in the future it will be just as common as taking the family to the cinema.

Kindergarden Concerts
Preschool children should also have the possibility of experiencing music of high quality in their everyday life. LMS arranges every year one project with concerts in kindergardens for three to six years old children. Both children and kindergarten teachers have been very pleased with this project.

For the kindergarden project LMS, in collaboration with the musicians, design material for preparing the musical experience. At the same time each child gets a postcard describing the project, to take home to their parents. The actual concert process begins with a music workshop, in which a musician from the orchestra visits each group of children. This functions as a prelude and an appetizer to the following concert in the institution. Finally one or two family concerts are arranged for the children, parents and kindergarden teachers in the area.

The kindergarden project shows that it is possible to present music, which traditionally is not considered children's music. It seems to be the quality and authenticity of the music rather than the relation between 'children's music' and 'grown up's music', that determines, whether the musical experience catches fire among younger children.