Really excited to have been invited to spend part of this week teaching on the South West Music School’s autumn residential composer’s course in Exeter. It’s my first time working with on this particular project and I look forward to meeting all the awesome young artists involved.
I’ve subtitled the course: “The String Quartet: Inside/Out” - we’re going to be writing for and learning about string quartets, working closely with professional players who are going to be in residence throughout the course. I’ve designed the course to look particularly at the ways different composers have approached issues of idiomatic writing in their music and what that does/can come to mean. They’ll be composing. They’ll be listening. And they’re be quite a lot of crazy, exciting music. Hopefully a fun time will be had by all!
This week is actually a ludicrously busy one for me. I’ll be rushing back from Exeter to be around for the second half of the 2013 New Music North West festival, hosted by the RNCM and The University of Manchester. It was such a shame that these two exciting projects have overlapped. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be in Manchester for the Tom McKinney’s performance of bet maryam at 5:15pm on Wednesday, which I am really disappointed about - although I’m absolutely convinced that it will be stellar - but I shall be attending everything else I possibly can from the evening of the Wednesday to the close of the festival on the Saturday, including Tom Bayman’s performance of my own bet merkorios at 10pm on Thursday night.
So, on this occasion, I genuinely plead with you that you do go along in my absence and send some support to both the Toms. While I’m away, I’ll be sending out the best possible vibes I can from down in Exeter.
Hope your weeks are all equally exciting, if not more!
Matthew