Breathe: Music for Wellbeing is designed to empower you and your team, colleagues, or clients, to explore how music can help to reduce stress and anxiety and process complex emotions experienced in the workplace or daily life.

Rushing through fast-paced and demanding lives, we often forget to pause and breathe. Our Breathe: Music for Wellbeing sessions enable participants to enjoy 45 to 90 minutes of meditative listening and the opportunity to ‘breathe in’ the music. Guided by the musicians of Scottish Ensemble, you will listen to a selection of pieces and explore how you feel the music in your body, physically and emotionally. This live music experience allows people to find valuable protected time to focus on their wellbeing and explore their emotional states through music of differing moods. Participants will be shown how to use music to manage stress and find new ways to talk about emotions or wellbeing challenges; the shared meditative experience will also enhance team synergy and support.

The core structure of these sessions offers a high degree of flexibility. We will co-design elements with your organisation, identifying specific challenges faced by your teams and associating suitable musical content and mood. We will also develop wellbeing toolkits for participants including playlists and listening guides to use and explore after the event.

While a live setting for groups of between 10-20 people offers the highest impact, the sessions can be delivered digitally, with performances live streamed and interaction achieved through a live chat function. The sessions can also be scaled up to suit larger departments or teams.

Scottish Ensemble is the UK’s leading professional string orchestra, internationally recognised for our innovative programme of music making, both in the concert hall and in the community.

Since our foundation in 1969, we have consistently pushed the boundaries of what a classical music performance can look and feel like. We experiment with production choices, unusual venues, visually striking presentations and audience interaction, demonstrating that classical music is a relevant, vibrant, living artform. We perform and work with diverse communities across Scotland and take our work across the UK and internationally. Each year, our outstanding musicians give over 40 performances and reach over 10,000 people through ticketed activity. A year-round programme of community and digital work further enhances our impact and reach at home and abroad.

When we arrive in a concert hall, we transform it – whether through visually striking production, collaborations with dance and theatre artists, or musicians playing from memory and freed from their static positions behind music stands. We also use our music-making to enhance individual and societal wellbeing, working with groups of all ages, and including those facing socio-economic and wellbeing challenges, such as the New Scots community and people coping with complex health diagnoses.