A week a year new things
A crazy week just finished. I moved to Birmingham after a hellish move in day of late van’s missed trains and phone battery deaths. But I’m here and more than just alive.
The week started with a journey to London in air so hot it could have been tomato soup to rehearse a piece with the outstanding madman/genius Neil Luck for probably the biggest gig in my life: the BBC bloody proms.
Imposter syndrome was rife last week. Here I was on stage with a brilliant composer-performer and an amazing cellist/composer Rebecca Burden playing to a big audience in the beautiful Battersea arts centre. I was playing on a lineup that had one of my all time heroes Jennifer Walshe on it. Had I earned such a great opportunity that I think most musicians wouldn’t think of passing up? I don’t think so. Even after the performance I still don’t think so. But this is okay. The experience made me want to feel like I could earn these sort of opportunities and the only way I can do that is to work hard. So that’s what I’m going to do.
I’m now in Birmingham ready for another crazy couple of months before launching into studying this masters degree in experimental performance. Last year I graduated from my undergraduate degree and wanted to spend the year learning and developing. If you told me then I would have set up a performance platform, had four successful concerts, achieved some funding for more, played at the proms, been commissioned to perform a collection of work and been awarded a scholarship to study in Birmingham, I probably would have been pretty confused.
I was going to write about how this is the end of my time in York, but it isn’t is it? I’m not saying goodbye cause the city is such a big part of my work and life that I’m going to be back. At some point. Maybe.
These blogs make little sense or are in any way coherent, but I like to scrape these thing off the side of my head onto an online space that I don’t think many people read. Bit more real than a journal thought.
You can listen to our prom gig here. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00075dt
You can find out more about Neil here
You can listen to Rebecca Burden here.
You can find more news about what I’m up to on here and twitter.