Brenda Rattray
Brenda is an Educator, Composer, Performer and Artist. Her specialism is a passion for teaching expressive voice to people in all areas of the community from high profile psychiatric prisons to special schools, Montessori nurseries to the BBC Concert and Symphony Orchestras.
Staff details
Brenda Rattray is a musician with over 30 years’ experience of teaching and performing all over the world. Her passion and focus is the expressive potential of the human voice.
Her compositions and arrangements for choirs are published by Faber Music and her book ‘The Joy of singing,’ has been adopted by many choirs internationally.
She has a long association with Goldsmiths University where she obtained her postgraduate certificate and is now an Associate Lecturer as well as an Associate Lecturer Representative.
Besides being a performer leading her own groups she has also been lead singer with the Grand Union Orchestra for over ten years and has sang with many big jazz and gospel names including Stan Tracey, Duncan Lamont, Ian Shaw, Carol Grimes, Pee Wee Ellis and the London Community Gospel Choir.
Her work in the community goes beyond just singing but also using the human voice as a tool for creativity, expression and healing. This has brought her in contact with groups from every walk of life. From Montessori nurseries to the Maze and Broadmoor prisons, hospitals, hospices, special needs schools, churches and orchestras.
She is founder of Voice Expressions, a company with a team who share her vision to create educational workshops that empower individuals with skills and a greater awareness of how loved and special they are. Her classes are built on a foundation of safety and students are loved and accepted wherever they find themselves in life’s journey. Her aim is to play her part in building bridges between communities. Her work is skills based and she has an enormous talent and passion for teaching, coaching and mentoring.
Her clients include high profile psychiatric hospitals, The English National Opera, The Royal National Institute for the Blind, as well as the London Philharmonic and both the BBC Concert and Symphony Orchestras with whom she has toured and for whom she composes and arranges. She also trains the Orchestras highly skilled musicians to communicate their skills at various levels with varied communities.
For Women’s Aid she has been a trainer of the Keys to Freedom course for women who suffer domestic violence achieving an ‘Excellence in Education’ award in 2014 as a result.
From this she has gone on to work with ex sex-workers building self-worth and self-esteem and in the field of addiction running workshops for families to make music together.