Artist, producer, Musical Director and DJ

Max Reinhardt regularly presents BBC R3's Late Junction and was formerly Musical Director for theatre company Oily Cart.  Max’s 35 years of experience with Oily Cart is as composer/musical director, working with young audiences from babies to 18 year olds, in general and also those with Complex Learning Difficulties and Autistic children. 

In March this year he was keynote speaker London Early Years Music Network (LEYMN) annual conference at the Elgar Room, Royal Albert Hall, covering “A Musical Philosophy for Early Years”, “Music in Early Years Theatre”, “Composition for Early years Theatre”, and “The Way Ahead (Playing The Curriculum)”.  Max is three years into teaching and developing a “New Approaches to Musical Theatre” module on the “Actor Musicians” course at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, which is becoming increasingly influential in their practice. It includes improvisational, aleatory and sound art approaches along with practical introductions to internationally culturally diverse musics.

As an artist, Max has also performed at major venues/festivals as a DJ/musician and with his own works, which includes: electroacoustic Afrobeat project The Shrine Synchro System alongside Rita Ray and featured guests including Tony Allen, Andy Sheppard, Shingai Shoniwah, Stella Chiweshe, B.R.I.E.S, Claude Deppa, Ernst Reijsiger, Weird MC, Finn Peters and Byron Wallen ; “Ketubah” (OCM commission) performed in Oxford and Lithuania and featured in a BBC Radio 4 documentary; The 5th Quarter Suite for The Calling (Spitalfields Music commission); live film soundtracks for Nanook of the North and Nosferatu with Rita Ray, Tunde Jegede and Ben Mandelson;   soundscape projects for Basel Art Fair, Miami Beach; worked with a diverse range of artists including Eliza Carthy, Martin Green, Maya Youssef and Sheema Mukherjee on music for theatre and was musical director for Suitcase 1938, the immersive theatre piece about the Kindertransport that toured the major stations in the UK in November/December 2013.  Max has the ability to imagine and create unique happenings that involve and inspire people from a range of music backgrounds. The participatory and accessible nature of his work has a powerful impact on those that take part and has the capacity to reach broad demographics.

Over the past year, OCM and Max have worked together on his Instant Orchestra series of projects and also the development in parallel of a music education initiative:  Playing the Curriculum.  It uses the same core approach to music making as Instant Orchestra to create instant performances by musicians and non-musicians in class rooms and school performances. We’re currently working on establishing the pilot project  which hopes to create a weekly session in three primary schools in the Oxford area where the whole class makes sound and music together...often improvising, using the trained and the untrained, empowering the musical elements in all the pupils/students...leading to a different awareness of what music is and might be and who can be and what is a musician. These sessions can be led by class teachers who may or may not be music specialists.

Image Credit: Farrows Creative (banner)

If you are interested in booking Instant Orchestra, contact Jo Ross (01865 484777 / jo@ocmevents.org)