Happy New Year! First announcement of the year is that I am now a daddy. Eleanor Felicity was born on 2nd January weighing 8lb 10oz. She is a gorgeous little girl (not that I’m biassed at all) and seems to enjoy vying for attention with Geoffrey and Ruxpin when she isn’t draining her mother’s milk! She hasn’t visited the studio yet to hear the piano play but there is plenty of time for that.
I sang my last service as a lay clerk at Chester Cathedral on Christmas Day. Having sung there for over 10 years it’s quite the end of an era but it will free up a considerable amount of time every week to do more teaching, enjoy some family time and take more wedding bookings.
The new teaching schedule is set up and starts this week. I will now be teaching 5 days a week rather than 7, keeping the weekends free to spend with the little bundle of joy. I have also stopped doing home visits for piano lessons. The studio is all clean and shiny again (thanks to my mother-in-law) and ready for the new term with a new recording facility.
I’m looking forward to more student concerts and exam success this year. Last year, 34 students took piano exams which has to be the busiest I’ve been in that respect over the past 9 years. I also saw the most engagement with my student composition task with 22 students completing a backing track for the Autumn Leaves video. Plans are afoot for a similar sort of creative music technology project this term. Watch this space for more information.
The next student concert series will be taking place at the beginning of March 2014. The title will be “River and Rainbow”, a pastoral countryside theme for springtime. The theme is inspired by some charming compositions of Walter Carroll who published a number of books of these delightful pieces over a century ago. These compositions will feature strongly in the concerts this term as I am assigning pieces for my students to learn so that the concert programmes largely follow the theme this time.
