• 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…

  • Musical Creativity

  • Virtuoso Teacher Review

    My review of Paul Harris’ Virtuoso Teacher appears in the most recent issue of Music Education Asia magazine. The magazine can be read for free on iPhone/iPad via a free download. Additionally I will be speaking at the Music Education Asia’s conference, MusicLearningLive! 2013, taking place in October in Singapore.

  • New Voices @ CUA

    My choral piece ‘Versa est in luctum’ was performed in January as part of the New Voices festival at Catholic University of the Arts in Washington, DC. As part of the festival website I was asked to write about the piece and my musical inspiration; below is what I submitted. Originally published on the festival…

  • Corpo: Lixa da Alma (Waste: Body of Soul)

    Anomalous Visuals writes of the work that I composed music for: “Performed at Cena Brasil Internacional Festival, Waste-Body of the Soul was an international multimedia installation involving artists based in London, Berlin and Rio. Conceived by costume designer Mauricio Carneiro and artist Beo da Silva, the collaborative project combines performance, poetry, live feed video, music…

  • 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…

  • Quote in ‘Musicians Handbook’ (Rhinegold, 2013)

    Not that I’m saying much here…

  • Keynote Student Conference

    It was an enjoyable day yesterday joining of a team of experienced musicians and teachers to talk about the performing, composing and analysing/listening components of the A Level Music courses. The audience of over 250 students and teachers were appreciative and got involved with enthusiasm and humour with the various activities. What made the day…