Early Years

Very early on in my viola playing days I joined the local music service’s Saturday Orchestra giving me the experience of performing right from the very beginning at 7 years old. It gave me a taste of the process of learning a piece of music, practicing it and performing the finished product. I realised that somehow the reward of performing and getting recognition for playing made learning pieces of music enjoyable! Just a couple of months later, I began to learn the guitar which was, for me, a way of playing music on my own and being able to explore music just for fun! In those days I had aspirations of playing songs like “ Drifting by Andy Mckee” and I’d spend hours learning it bit by bit, working it out by ear…looking back, I realise I missed a couple of steps before trying to learn an impossibly difficult song, but I wasn’t going to be beaten!

At the age of 11, I began learning the piano. I always thought the piano was one of the best instruments, because I thought it was one of the few instruments that you can play anything on. I had briefly had keyboard lessons around the same time that I started learning the guitar and viola, but the full piano felt like a completely different instrument! I started having piano lessons and I began learning to read music, it became apparent quite quickly that I was very good with my ears from listening to all those difficult guitar songs and working them out, but I was terrible at reading music and I didn’t like the fact that I could be playing such simple pieces and struggling!

Success

However, at a similar time, in my school music class we took a listening test in which I was the only student to have ever received 100% (which I attribute to all the mispent time listening to songs and trying to work them out) and I was invited to play guitar in the Jazz Band. This allowed me to learn how to improvise, learn about chords and how to perform on the fly. It was in one of these rehearsals that I remember sitting down at the piano and playing “Moonlight Sonata Op. 27, No. 2 by Beethoven”, which I had spent some time learning by ear the night before just for fun. After this, I was approached by the head of music with a proposal to be taught viola and piano by two of the music department teachers. Through doing this I started to take reading music more seriously and developed a thirst for understanding how music was made and why it has such an effect! My knowledge of music theory enabled me to pick up lots of different instruments quite quickly, one of which was the saxophone, which I picked up to play in the school concert band.

A year later at the age of 13, I began studying for GCSE music in a class with the 16 year olds and complete A Level Music Technology by the age of 16. This was also when I achieved Grade 8 ABRSM in the piano, skipping grades 1-7. Having built up my music reading ability, I began to accompany several local choirs, started my own choir and I began teaching the piano at the age of 15.

Throughout my school years I regularly wrote arrangements of songs for the school bands and I wrote and performed music for several ensembles that I set up, including a saxophone quintet and a 7 part a cappella group.