Reboot

Happy New Year and welcome to 2023!

It has been some time since I made any significant updates to this website, and over 2 years since I added anything to the blog. Saying the pandemic weighed heavily on all of us would be an understatement, and many in the creative arts found their work and thus their sources of income heavily curtailed or removed altogether. While ‘business as usual’ supposedly returned in 2022 the escalating cost of living crisis in the UK has damaged the recovery of many sectors, including the creative arts, and I have had fewer enquiries from potential new students in the last year than I have at any time since I started teaching in 2013, including at the height of the pandemic.

That said, 2023 is a new year and I feel it deserves some shoots of rebirth. I will still be posting educational content and resources for students but there will be more content about composition and more new works published this year. I have been tidying up my archives and fleshing out snippets and half-finished pieces from the depths of my hard drives, ready to share them with the world, and my first published piece of the new year is Hypervigilance, a short elementary level (~Grade 3) piece for solo piano, which you can listen to on SoundCloud and buy on Score Exchange

I received Composing with Constraints by Jorge Variego for Christmas and will be sharing some of my works based on exercises from this book, along with analysis and learning tips for various public domain pieces in Piece of the Week, and other regular or one-off features. I plan to add new content at least once a week, but also to only post what I feel is worth sharing and not churn out mediocre content for the sake of algorithms. I don’t know exactly how all this is going to work out yet, but that’s part of the fun!

I wish you all a happy and prosperous new year and that 2023 brings you everything you hope for.