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6338027_84787dca81_bInspiration 

I’d love to say I was one of those people who could sit down and practise for hours on end. Sometimes simply getting behind the piano can seem like a lot of effort. Life has an amazing way of getting in the way!

So how do you keep inspired to keep practising and keep your bum on the piano stool? Here are a few tips to help you keep the music flowing.

  1. Go live! Nothing beats live music to give you the drive to practise more. A good performance is electrifying. You don’t have to spend a fortune travelling to the large concert halls all the time – why not check out what’s happening in your local area? Remember that a perfect performance is very rare, but it’s the essence of joy that you get from a live performance that you want to recreate when you play.
  2. Listen. If you’re working on the same piece for a long time (perhaps for an exam) try to find different recordings of it and see if you can spot the difference between performances. Altering the tempo, phrasing or interpretation by the smallest amount can turn a piece from a trudge into a joy.
  3. Try something new. I do have a slight music buying problem, but when I’m lacking the drive to focus on one piece I can guarantee a look through a new book will keep me glued to the piano.  Again, it doesn’t need to cost the earth, why not check your local charity shops? This is also a great sight-reading exercise that doesn’t feel like work.
  4. Play what you love. There’s no point tearing your hair out with pieces that you absolutely hate. I do give students pieces that I would describe as being ‘good for them’, and it is always great to challenge yourself, but if you can’t find something interesting or rewarding about the piece, or if you find you’re avoiding the piano completely because you hate it, then stop.
  5. Get a great teacher. No matter what level of playing you’re at, we could all do with a guiding hand from time to time. A good teacher is worth their weight in gold and a great teacher can make the world of difference. Tutors get you thinking about pieces in a different way and often offer suggestions for difficult pieces that you might not have thought about.
  6. Turn off your phone. Will something interesting happen in the next 30 minutes? Probably not. Will someone post a picture of their lunch? Probably.
  7. Go outside. A breath of fresh air is perfect for refreshing the mind and a change of scenery can be great to let your thoughts flow around any difficult music problems
  8. Put the music away. For me, inspiration to play often comes through noodling and trying out new things on the piano. Let your hands go for it and see what happens.

Rachael Forsyth

Born and raised in York, Rachael now works as a full time composer, music teacher and performer based in Hertford. Over the years she has written a broad range of pieces in a broad range of styles for ensembles of all shapes and sizes. As a tutor she loves to write works that are educational and challenging yet build up on the foundations of musical knowledge that most possess. Her works always encapsulate emotive figures and many piece contain visual elements during the performance as well.

The highlight of her career so far has been premièring a new work for solo saxophone on a tour around Italy and discussing her work as a female composer. Rachael’s style could be described as a fusion of musical genres. She brings together her musical passions for classical, jazz, ska and folk to create new music that is widely accessible as well as hauntingly beautiful.

Website: www.rachaelforsyth.co.uk

Twitter: @rachaelcomposes

 

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‘By Special Arrangement’
Saturday January 9th, 2016,
Cadogan Hall, Sloane Square

To Cadogan Hall on Saturday night for my first concert of 2016, this time not piano music but an evening in the company of The Pink Singers. Long before Gareth Malone first encouraged people to sing together, The Pink Singers were founded in 1983, and are the longest running LGBT choir in Europe. The Pink Singers are London’s LGBT community choir, comprising over 80 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people from a diverse range of backgrounds united by a passion for singing. In addition to performing two London concerts each year, The Pink Singers also sing with other choirs in the UK and around the world and participate in Gay pride and other festivals for LGBT people. The choir is directed by Murray Hipkin, who also serves on the musical staff of English National Opera.

There was a great atmosphere in the bar before the concert, much noisy greetings of friends, conversations and laughter heralding an evening of fine singing, entertainment, and a wonderful, all-consuming sense of a shared experience.

The Pink Singers are most definitely performers as well as singers: this was clear from their opening number, ‘Mr Blue Sky’ by ELO, which included a spoof newscast, dancing, mime and animated singing. Later in the evening, a performance of ‘Masculine Women Feminine Men’ (Leslie & Monaco, arr. Murray Hipkin) came complete with a dash of Busby Berkeley-style dancing.

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A clue to the theme of the evening was in the title of the concert – By Special Arrangement. The programme showcased not only the diversity of music for SATB voices, but also the special talents of arrangers within The Pink Singers. There were particularly tender and poignant renditions of ‘This Woman’s Work’ by Kate Bush (arr. Andy Mitchinson) and Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ (arr. Chris Chambers), a song which always reduces me to tears. There was also an extraordinarily powerful setting of text from Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘The Zanies of Sorrow’ by Matthew King, originally commissioned for the North London Chorus. There was also a charming, reflective setting of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by W B Yeats by Fran George (who happens to be a piano teaching friend and colleague of mine).

The variety of music, from showstoppers from opposing ends of the world of music (‘Relax’ meets ‘Zadok the Priest’!) to tender intimate ballads such as Bob Dylan’s ‘Make You Feel My Love’ and ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ demonstrated The Pink Singers’ ability to switch effortlessly between myriad soundworlds, genres and moods. And get this, the choir is largely composed of non-professional musicians (I hesitate to use the word “amateur” because to all intents and purposes these singers are totally professional, in both their sound, precise timing and slick, seamless presentation).

But there’s more….. In addition to the main choir, The Pink Singers has also spawned number of smaller ensembles , two of which had guest spots in the concert. The Barberfellas are a close harmony group – with a twist (they wear tight shorts and high heels!). Their set was witty and naughty, but also sensitive and tender, as evidenced by a lovely rendition of M.L.K. by U2 in an arrangement by Bob Chilcott. We also enjoyed a set by Gin and Harmonics, an all-female close harmony group whose repertoire included a lovely setting of Sea Fever by John Masefield (music by Kate Nicholroy, a member of the ensemble) and Biebl’s Ave Maria.

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The Barberfellas

 

Gin and Harmonics perform ‘Mad World’

It was a splendid start to my concert-going year, and the evident enjoyment of all the singers and the audience combined to create an evening that was uplifting, joyous, tender, and poignant and, above all, a celebration of music and community.

The next Pink Singers concert is at Cadogan Hall on 4th June 2016.

The Pink Singers

The Barberfellas

Gin and Harmonics

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The Pierrot Studio: Music. Art. Sound. Light. Performance. An exhibition supporting emerging artists and reaching new audiences

The Pierrot Studio

5 – 17 February 2016
Concert Opening: 4 February 2016
Performances begin at 18:30
Display Gallery, 26 Holborn Viaduct, London, EC1A 2AQ

The Pierrot Studio brings together sculpture, cutting edge music, light, sound, strobe and performance into one harmonious space: an exhibition that allows the worlds of visual art and classical music to collide through a series of collaborative installations and concerts.

Three artists and three composers will work together to create visual/aural artworks inspired by 20th Century visionary Arnold Schönberg. Each pairing will explore thematic elements of Schönberg’s seminal song cycle ‘Pierrot Lunaire’. The Dr. K Sextet will perform the new compositions written for each installation at the opening of the exhibition.

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Tim A Shaw and Ewan Campbell will take Schönberg’s study, or studio, as their starting point and will construct a skeleton, life size timber frame replica of this room, based upon photographs of the composer at work. Rather than presenting a stable or fixed piece of architecture, the installation will be much more akin to a psychic, virtual or imagined shell. The immersive room will include re-imaginings of Schönberg’s ‘musical’ sketches and painted self portraits.

Sara Naim and Chris Roe will create a poetic and transient rendering of Schönberg’s moonscape in ‘Pierrot Lunaire’. Roe’s composition will be amplified beneath a shallow vessel of milk. As the speakers reverberate with the varying tones and frequencies of the music, the liquid will begin to ripple and embody the sound through the various geometric patterns that appear in it. Naim will illuminate the milk with a strobe every 13 seconds in reference to Schönberg’s notorious triskaidekaphobia. She will create a series of frozen, sculptural moments, between which the audience will wait in darkness, absorbing the sound without vision.

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Jörg Obergfell and Stef Conner will look specifically at the absurdist nature of Pierrot Lunaire and create a series of masks and musical motives around the various archetypal Pierrot characters. Conner’s compositions will be interwoven around a central, slowly developing theme of laughter. Obergfell will translate these characters into more or less abstract mask forms that draw inspiration from both folk costumes and modernist aesthetics.

The exhibition is programmed by The Pierrot Project, an arts collective that encourages interdisciplinary collaboration between artists, composers and musicians.

The Pierrot Studio

Dr K Sextet

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Pianist Christina McMaster certainly does not lack ambition, nor innovation. She created her own record label MC|MASTER Records in order to release her debut album Pinks & Blues, the sold out launch of which at St James’s Theatre included a performance by a rapper. This reflects Christina’s eclectic approach, vision and energy in her music making (she has previously collaborated with London Fashion Week and is now joining forces with graduates of Central St Martin’s School of Art & Design).

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Pinks & Blues presents contrasting music from two key soundworlds in American music in the 20th century: the industrial, pioneering spirit and the rise of the teeming metropolis (demonstrated in works such as Samuel Barber’s ‘Excursions’ and Frederick Rzewski’s ‘Winsboro Cotton Mill Blues’), and Negro spirituals, Southern blues, smoky jazz clubs and the foot-stomping dance scene of New York City. The album also includes new commissions by two exciting young British composers, Freya Waley-Cohen and Richard Bullen, and on two tracks Christina is joined by Jay Phelps (trumpet), Sami Tammilehto (percussion) and Mark Lewandowski (double bass).

The album opens with the first of Barber’s ‘Excursions’, a work whose frenetic “perpetuum mobile” ostinato bassline suggests the fast-moving big city, replete with rattling metro trains, honking taxis and bustling crowds. But by track three, ‘Peace Piece’ by Bill Evans, we’re transported somewhere altogether more calm – the shady deck of a southern villa perhaps. There is a lightness of touch here which suggests both repose and an urging forward. The work is bookended by two Études by Ligeti which contain motifs redolent of Evans, also deftly played.

Richard Bullen’s ‘Scenes from a Deserted Jazz Club’ is highly atmospheric, at once smoochy and unsettling. It is followed by Frederick Rzewski’s ‘Winsboro Cotton Mill Blues’, another work of hypnotic, urgent energy immediately proceeded by the second of Barber’s Excursions, a languid blues number.

Freya Waley-Cohen’s ‘Southern Leaves’ opens with a figure reminiscent of a southern hymn tune which builds in intensity through increasingly plangent chords. It is meditative and dramatic, and provides a good foil for Gershwin’s ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ (from Porgy & Bess, which is of course set in the Deep South). Back to the urgency of the industrial city with Stephen Montague’s ‘Songs of Childhood’, while the album closes with another work by Montague’s, ‘Southern Lament: Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen’, the traditional spiritual given a contemporary twist with fanfare-like repeated figures, strumming and plucking the piano’s strings directly, and a restful hymnlike section to close.

This imaginative selection neatly reflects Christina’s personal musical tastes and her eclectic approach to programming. The American theme ehich runs through the entire album ties together tracks which in another’s hands may seem disparate, but such is Christina’s expertise in moving seamlessly between the percussive and agitated and the meditative and soulful, she achieves a very satisfying and enjoyable whole. The more bluesy numbers have the requisite sense of time standing still with sensitive use of rubato and elastic tempi, while the upbeat, more mechanical works are precise, sprightly and crisply articulated. This album promises much more to come from this exciting and stylish young pianist.

www.christinamcmaster.com

Meet the Artist……Christina McMaster