The music man (From Gazette & Herald)

The music man

Q: How did you first become interested in music?

A: Well, when I was eight, I went away to choir school. It was a school where we

did 22 hours of singing a week and so that was a pretty major undertaking, especially starting at a young age. I suppose once you start doing that much music, you're going to continue it throughout your life, really.

Q: What qualifications do you have in music?

A: I did my undergraduate music degree at Nottingham University and then I stayed on for a further year to do an MA and got that. After that, I went to Hobton College, Cambridge, to do my teaching. I've got some music examination certificates, but that's from when I was much younger of course.

Q: You mentioned your singing, do you play any instruments as well?

A: I play the piano. I suppose that's my main instrument, apart from singing. I play the flute, but it rarely comes out of its case these days. I've started playing the organ, as well, because about a year ago, I took over as director of music at St Gregory's Minster, Kirkdale. I started playing the organ a little bit more for one or two services when our regular organist was away. I think it would be fair to say that I am still improving on the organ, rather than the finished article.

Q: Do you have your own choir?

A: Well, I run the choir at St Gregory's. It's not my choir: it's very much the church's choir, and I've done that for the best part of a year now. I've always sung in choirs, and when I lived down in Hertfordshire, before I moved to the area, I ran a church choir down there as well.

Q: So are you thinking of making the school choir more of a regular thing, rather than just for special occasions?

A: Definitely. It will run regularly. My intention is to offer two choirs, one for years 7 and 8, and one for years 9, 10 and 11 and select music appropriate to the ability of the age range.

Q: How long exactly have you been teaching?

A: This is my sixth year. I started in September 1998, and this is my third school in that time.

Q: Why did you want to go into teaching, rather than performing?

A: I suppose if I'm being really honest, to make a career as a performer you have to be absolutely top-notch and practice a lot, and I wasn't ever going to be quite good enough. So I thought, well, I'm going to do something with music - what are the alternatives? I thought, well I'd always thought I might teach, and just thought, well, yeah, let's give it a go, see how we get on and, well, here we are.

Q: How are you finding Ryedale School so far?

A: Oh, fantastic. It's been really, really good. Everyone's made me feel very welcome. It's a friendly place; the staff and pupils seem to get on very well; very friendly staff room. So far, so good.

Q: What do you hope to bring to Ryedale School in the way of music?

A: Well, I hope to provide as wide a range of opportunity for as many people as are interested in being involved. There's obviously a core of pupils who have been learning musical instruments from a young age, and have a natural interest to be doing that, and that's fine, fantastic.

But you've also got to look a little bit beyond that, to see if we can't open opportunities up to pupils who wouldn't necessarily consider themselves naturally musical.

Everyone deserves the opportunity to involve themselves in music if they want to. There's a whole different range of things, according to what is appropriate.

Q: Have you got any plans/ideas for raising money for the specialist status?

A: As far as I understand, we're nearly there with the money. With regard to if we need to raise more - if we do, then there are many ways of doing fundraising events. The most straightforward would be just to organise a concert, or perhaps a sponsored event - like I've done a sponsored sing before, and perhaps a play.

We did a 24-hour music marathon where we stayed at school overnight on a Friday night. It was epic!

There are lots of ways of raising extra revenue if we need to, but we seem to fairly confident that we are nearly there.

Q: How involved are you going to be on the performing arts side?

A: I hope to be very involved. A combination of music, good art and drama - to

work in collaboration with each other.

There's a lot of overlap to the subjects: an overlap of skills involved in practical work, or presentation work, whether it be dramatic, musical or artistic, and perhaps if there are common themes throughout what each class is doing individually, we ought to bring those together and make an effort to really work as a unit, a team.

Updated: 12:12 Wednesday, March 17, 2004