Category: Education

  • Pro Corda Recomposed

    It was a real pleasure to teach composition on the Senior Course at Pro Corda in August; all the students had a genuine love for chamber music and enjoyed every minute of their time in the beautiful surroundings of Leiston Abbey, Suffolk. I wanted to devise a composition project that would allow the students to…

  • Woodwose: Wigmore’s first opera

    I never thought I’d see a bicycle whizz by me in the Wigmore Hall but it immediately captured the scene for the opening of Woodwose; the first ever community opera at Wigmore Hall. What makes the project so exciting for me is that the community of 120 local children and adults – joined by the…

  • Opera “too difficult”?

    I read Susan Elkin’s piece for The Independent, ‘Why are educationists so afraid of cultural excellence?’ with much nodding of my head. I am particularly passionate about promoting living artists in my teaching – right from Year 4 upwards – and also ensuring pupils are engaging with as much music as they can, from a…

  • Developing listening

    I love working with other music teachers on INSET courses, and I had a particularly enjoyable day leading a course for a group of passionate teachers on Monday. Much of my course looks at approaches to starting compositions and the afternoon focused on perception skills. I had such a thought-provoking time in Berlin while on…

  • National Curriculum Draft

    It’s always exciting to read yet another education document, and the publication of the draft National Curriculum is rather hefty at over two hundred pages. Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity. A high-quality music education should engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and…

  • Ignite inspires at Wigmore Hall

    I’m all for collaborative composition; new music works best when it is a partnership between performer and composer that allows both parties to communicate confidently and faithfully. Ignite gave a short but compelling recital as part of Wigmore Hall’s Aperitif Series on Tuesday 4 June 2013 that demonstrated how successful this collaborative work can be.…

  • Let them make noise

    Jonathan Savage encourages us to ‘find time, in what are our undoubtedly busy lives, to read and reflect on the broad literature of music education’. His new book The Guided Reader to Teaching and Learning Music (Routledge 2013) is a collection of what he considers key writers that have inspired his pedagogy, and he rightly…

  • Repeating Music

    Enjoyable and educational concert by the London Sinfonietta last night; an introduction to minimalism, combined with video design and curated with quotes and extracts of interviews from the three composers programmed. Phillip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley made a well paced programme which included some visually interesting pieces (Pendulum Music by Reich) and the…

  • ‘Re-enchanting the quotidian’

    ‘Re-enchanting the quotidian’, writes Stuart Jeffries in his Guardian review of Michael Foley’s 2012 book ‘Embracing the Ordinary’. I quite like that. An interesting read particularly for the comparison of Proust and Joyce, this book attempts to instil a sense of wonder in the minutiae of existence that perhaps we often overlook. I latched onto…

  • Keep asking questions

    Below are some questions are invite my pupils to ask of their composition coursework for GCSE and A Level music. There can never be one way to approach this but only suggestions of where a piece of coursework could go. Stylistic consistency is the key to a successful composition for GCSE and A Level and…