Biography

Dorset roots

I was born in Swanage, a seaside town on the South coast of England, and grew up in Weymouth 30 miles along the coast.

Swanage

Real piano came later, along with recorder and I used to write out 'second lines' so that my sister and I could play recorder duets. We graduated to joining two other friends and playing recorder quartets on descant, treble, tenor and bass instruments. My favourite was the tenor as I liked the deeper sounds and the harmonies. It was very much a learning ground and I do remember struggling! At school I started violin, terribly frustrating for someone with small hands and a short little finger. After family discussions and a meeting with the violin teacher I switched to learning flute and I worked through the Associated Board graded exams for both flute and piano. I took part in holiday orchestras and joined the Weymouth Arts Centre orchestra and enjoyed a big band where I envied the saxophonists, and at home used to accompany a clarinetist on the piano. I went on to study music at Dartington College of Arts in South Devon, a beautiful place well-known for its gardens with a medieval Tiltyard for jousting and sculptures by Henry Moore and others, and a 13th century Great Hall used to this day for concerts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartington_Hall

Studying at Dartington

Music students at Dartington had very enriching cultural experiences, not all confined to music. However within the musical training much of our activities included singing, in large or small groups, from a full sized choir to madrigals.  The college choir was compulsory for all music students and numbered 100.  We sang such works as Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, Britten's Hymn to St Cecilia and Brahms' Requiem. While there I travelled with a group of students to Salzburg to spend a week at the Carl Orff Institute, focussing on musical learning through percussion and recorder. 

If you are interested in more about Dartington & its Indian connections through the poet, artist & musician Tagore, plus some of my own family connections with India, please refer to the blog post on this link: 

http://soundseasylookseasy.blogspot.fr/2012/10/india-tagore-dartington-and-me-whats.html

Although the International Summer school still takes place there every year, sadly Dartington as a College of Arts closed down a few years ago.

Abergavenny Orchestral Society and the 'Fresh Air' wind quintet

While still in England on the English/Welsh border I played first flute for nearly four years in the Abergavenny Symphony orchestra and got together with some other members of the woodwind section to form a wind quintet, "Fresh Air". Wind quintets can be very versatile and our repertoire was wide ranging, each of us making our own suggestions and we played anything from Haydn, Poulenc, Elgar, & Scott Joplin to Debussy's 'Golliwog's Cakewalk' and Henry Mancini's 'The pink panther'. 

I have taught flute peripatetically in England, including at Malvern Girls' College in Worcestershire and Tutshill primary school in Monmouthshire, while continuing to teach piano and flute at home. In France I took up tenor saxophone, learning for three years with the Director of the Music School in Fuveau, Jean-Pierre Borne:

 http://ospa13.canalblog.com/