Leicester MusicFest is a music education charity built around an annual festival offering high-quality, accessible performance and music education opportunities to the diverse community of Leicester.

Each year, we engage thousands of visitors and give a supportive performance platform to hundreds of young and amateur musicians. Our varied programme includes concerts, workshops, masterclasses and competitions, in piano, singing, pipe organ, composition and more. Through the festival, we aim to enrich the cultural life of Leicester and Leicestershire, offering opportunities for people of all ages, abilities and demographics to perform, learn and be inspired. 

 

The festival was founded in 2016 by four local musicians and teachers concerned by a lack of high-quality and accessible performance opportunities for young people and amateur musicians in Leicester. Since then, we have achieved charitable status (2019), and our voluntary team has expanded to a management committee of nine and an army of over 50 event volunteers. 

 

As Leicester MusicFest has evolved over the last 11 years, we have grown from two event days to five, and provide additional opportunities throughout the year, through our Outreach Programme:
 

• Our Instrument Rehoming Scheme collects, cleans and repairs unwanted instruments and rehomes them to students in need. The scheme has rehomed nearly 500 instruments to date (as of June 2026).

 

• Our Forest Gamelan project installs outdoor music classrooms in primary schools, combining the well-documented benefits of both music education and outdoor learning. Following a successful pilot project at Tudor Grange Samworth Academy in 2023, we completed our second Forest Gamelan project at Robert Bakewell Primary School in Loughborough in 2025.

 

• Our Schools Outreach strand sees us partnering with local schools to provide workshops, performance projects and music trips. In recent years we have partnered on:

  • an Organ Inspiration Day for school children in Loughborough

  • funding towards travel costs to allow a school brass band to take part in the National Youth Brass Championships for the first time

  • ongoing equipment support for Charnwood College and Hinckley Schools Orchestra 

  • donating substantial sets of brass and stringed instruments to two local primary schools, to enable them to establish brand new funded tuition programmes

  • singing workshops in schools as part of community performance projects