Peter Rose and Anne Conlon

Peter Anthony Rose MBE (music) and Anne Conlon MBE (words) are award-winning writers best known for their environmental musicals for children. They were both teachers in Lancashire, England, for the majority of their creative achievements and most of their works have been written specially for St Augustine's RC High School, Billington. At the time Peter Rose was their head of music.

Rose and Conlon's first collaboration was The Conversion Job (1980–1); a currently unpublished musical which told the story of Augustine and his monks as they tried to convert Britain to Christianity. This was first performed at St Augustine's RC High School. Their second collaboration was the choral piece The Kestrel Song (1982), which was later published by their publishers Josef Weinberger (1995). This piece describes

"the thoughts of a kestrel as it hovers above the motorway… From the safety of the sky, the Kestrel watches "all the madness of these men rushing blindly onwards". The fog descends, but the traffic rushes on, until the inevitable disaster happens¹"

The Kestrel Song won them the 1982 BBC Pebble Mill – WWF Sounds Natural competition, which brought the writers to the attention of Ivan Hattingh, Head of Development at WWF-UK at the time. Shortly after this, Ivan Hattingh called the writers and asked them to write an extended musical, similar to The Kestrel Song, but about the Amazon Rainforest. Although it seemed an impossible task, they accepted and penned the first half of Yanomamo (1983), which described the beauties of the Amazon rainforest. By the second half, which contrasts the lighter first, the writers explore the human problems that existed in the Amazon basin at the time, and ask strong questions about western attitudes to tribal societies and our role in protecting such important and sensitive natural balances.

Yanomamo is a 90-minute work for chorus, soloists, narrator and stage band, and the original production, performed by the choir and musicians of St Augustine's RC High School, was narrated by Sir David Attenborough and premiered at the Royal Institute, London, before appearing at the Edinburgh Festival. They later performed Yanomamo in America, narrated by Sting, which production was recorded for television and later broadcast (on Easter Sunday, 1989) on Channel 4 under the title of Song of the Forest. The TV version was commercially released by WWF. Since its publication the musical has seen performances by thousands of children throughout the world. This interest was also helped by the inclusion of Yanomamo as part of the BBC Radio Music Workshop series for schools (1991), including a short dramatic script specially written for the series by Conlon. After the TV adaption was broadcast, the school was officially recognised when two of the young soloists were presented to the Duke of Edinburgh and presented with the Ford European Conservation Award in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

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