Tag: education

  • Pedagogy: exploring crocodiles

    I spend ages preparing sessions for early career music teachers; you don’t get much time to work with them and there’s pressure to make every minute count. Thankfully there is lots of good thinking in books such as this one that save some time in selecting the ideas, the provocations and the exemplification of practice…

  • 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…

  • Can we teach composition?

    After another batch of coursework is complete for GCSE and A-level music I like to look back and reflect on the year. I firmly believe in composition being an integral part of these examinations as it is the natural culmination of the study of musical rhetoric, in terms if its theoretical and stylistic constructs, and…

  • Curating a musical past

    Last autumn I attended an alumni/careers event at a university as a speaker; I was there to chat about my experiences of working in music education. Even now I often avoid writing “teacher” as so much negativity has developed around the “music teacher” role. This was particularly apparent when speaking to music students. Even after…