In October 2025, we had the absolute pleasure of welcoming a group of young vocalists aged 14-20 to our Woolwich Works home for a half-term project led by NYJO Emerging Professional musician Daisy Houlder.
Daisy is a London-based jazz vocalist. After studying music in Birmingham, Daisy released her debut EP ‘Until Now’ in 2022. Following the success of this project, Daisy continued to hone her craft studying for her Master’s in Jazz at Trinity Laban and as a vocalist with NYJO. It is here in London that she has continued to perform and create powerful new music, recently performing at Ronnie Scott’s, Morocco Bound, and The Royal Albert Hall.
On this two-day course, participants delved into the iconic catalogue of American songstress Carole King. Together, they explored King’s legendary songwriting and vocal style through group vocal arrangements, written and prepared by Daisy.
” I enjoyed singing in a group because there’s more freedom to experiment, and if you mess up people might not notice!”
Elise, Holiday Project Participant
“The highlight for me was doing the exercises when we were all standing in a tight circle with our eyes closed and really focussing on singing and blending together. I learnt that detail and precision is sometimes overrated, and that the feel and the group connection is the most important part!”
Daisy Houlder, NYJO Emerging Professional and Project Lead
With the leadership of Daisy, alongside NYJO Emerging Professional musician Dani Roade who acted as Assistant Educator and Accompanist on this project, the young people had the chance to gain a fresh perspective by inserting their voices into the instrumentation of these songs, connecting with the narrative of the lyrics, and bringing their own creative thoughts into the performance.
Through these workshops, we wanted to show young people who might usually sing alone that working with others can be really enjoyable, encouraging them to think about how they can use their voice to communicate a message and think more deeply about the meaning behind lyrics.
“I hope that the young people learnt about the legend that is Carole King and have a new appreciation for her songwriting. I also hope they discovered that sight reading doesn’t need to be scary or even hard!”
Daisy Houlder, NYJO Emerging Professional and Project Lead
One of the key focuses of this project was encouraging young people to read from Daisy’s charted arrangements. At the start of the first session, we asked them to rate from 1 to 10 (with 1 being ‘not at all’ and 10 being ‘extremely’) how confident they felt singing from notated music/charts. Their mean response was only 5.6, highlighting that this was an unfamiliar area for many of the young people in the group.
By the end of the project, however, they had all learnt 3 brand-new arrangements together, reading the charts with the support of Daisy and building their confidence understanding the links between what the dots showed on the page and the harmonies that they were being asked to sing out loud.
“My highlight from the project was hearing the young people sing “So Far Away” for the first time off-copy in rehearsal. Hearing them work so well as an ensemble was special.”
Dani Roade, NYJO Emerging Professional and Assistant Educator
Following this project, we are delighted to present Daisy’s arrangements of Carole King’s tunes Bitter with the Sweet, Come Down Easy, and So Far Away on our NYJO Network Digital Hub for schools and community singing groups to use themselves. These arrangements should be learnt through a mixture of aural learning and notated music reading. We hope that they can prove a fun and accessible way into choral music reading for more young people, supporting them to develop many other group singing skills and techniques.
If you’d like to get involved in our offer for young people aged 18 and under, drop us an email anytime at [email protected].