Tag Archives: Beethoven

Red pen resting on annotated essay

Take that tone

It’s that time of year again: essay marking. My lovely undergraduates at Middlesex University have been beavering away all year on long projects, which I am now tasked to assess. This is the time of year when academics sit together to discuss bloopers, inadvertently hilarious appealing spooling mistales (see what

Students clustered around a book, working something out

Put your back into it

I’ve been having tremendous fun this term teaching a course on the history of music criticism at City Lit. We’ve only had four sessions so far, but we’ve already covered some pretty major points for discussion including what should/shouldn’t fall within a reviewer’s domain; whether ad hominem arguments are allowed

Hearing Beethoven

It’s that time of year again, and I’m back in the stunning surroundings of north Yorkshire for the 2016 Ryedale Festival. Better still, I’ve been working again with the wonderful Heath Quartet in four concerts, presenting the entire late Beethoven quartets in tandem with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, read with

Take note

In 2004, full of trepidation that it wasn’t going to be good enough, I submitted my first paid programme note job to the staff of Lakeside Arts, Nottingham. I was a Masters student at the university there, and they needed someone to write about some of the Bartók string quartets

Harmonious Heroes

As anyone who has the vaguest interest in cinema, DVD collecting, watching the TV or even bus posters will know, superheroes are in. They have been for a while: men of steel, fortuitous victims of nuclear/chemical accidents, test subjects of government projects – heck, even sparkly vampires. They battle the

« Older Entries