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 she is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths University where she teaches Gospel/Soul/Jazz classes.

Besides being a performer leading her own groups, Brenda has also been lead singer with the Grand Union Orchestra for over ten years and has sung with many big jazz and gospel names including Stan Tracey, Duncan Lamont, Ian Shaw, Carol Grimes 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, churches and orchestras. 

Brenda 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 (training 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 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.

Brenda's workshop on Gospel Music will be followed by a Q&A on 'working as a black artist in the UK'.

This session is part of the Introduction to Jazz Course run by the Music Department, and is open on a discretionary basis to all members of the College. Please email Shzr Ee Tan (shzree.tan@rhul.ac.uk) if you wish to join the session and are not yet enrolled on the Jazz course.

Please note that the workshop will now take place on 6 December, and not on the previously advertised date of 29 November.