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Artificial intelligence impersonations of human writing are very good – and that’s why this writer isn’t afraid of them There’s lots of talk these days about ChatGPT and whether Artificial Intelligence will replace writers. Like many of my journalist colleagues, I’ve tinkered with it. Its various answers to the question ‘what is the future of classical music writing?’ are not actually that off-kilter (see below). On the other hand, it variously describes me as a cellist, founder of Sounds Like Now, editor of Primephonic, jury member of Young Musician of the Year and ‘known for her insightful writing on classical music and her expertise in the field’, so what does it know? Am I frightened for my career? Well of course in the days of nihilistic cost-cutting bean-counters, we should all be worried. On the other hand, of all industries, the creative ones know the value of humanity – of having a real, flawed human brain at the drawing board. That’s their whole point, after all. The answers the ChatGPT generates are impressive in their content, synthesised from real writer’s ideas and words, and it’s all perfectly well written. And that’s the problem with it, because humans don’t write perfectly well. We all have our quirks and tics, and that’s what makes writing interesting. Back in the day, I used to edit The Strad’s CD review section and would commission 30 or so reviews from a wide pool of writers. I could invariably identify each reviewer’s work without seeing their name. They each had their own idiosyncrasies – whether it was their use of specific adverbs or adjectives, their over-enthusiasm or under-enthusiasm, a reliance on historic context to fill the word count, a fixation on vibrato, their choice of Oxford commas or not, how they reacted to new music, how they liked to generate lists etc etc. When I first took it on as a green editor, I scrupulously ironed these all out, deleting all the extremities and specificities that stood out. No doubt the writers would get their proofs back (yes, we had time to send them out in those days) and not recognise their own words. As time went by, I realised how wrong I was and learnt to be more laissez-faire. Of course, there has to be a certain consistency in a publication, to which end a house style is essential, but maybe it is exactly the individual characteristics that make writing compelling, and the differences between them that keep readers’ attention and loyalty. The ChatGTP style is all smooth consistency and no character – bland, bland, bland. Now when I edit interviews, I cherish scrupulously the words and phrases that stand out and observe respectfully the nuances of a speaker’s tone. In all art, there is a precarious balance between consistency and technical perfection on one hand and uniqueness and creative freedom on the other. I’ve always been the first to whinge if a violinist plays out of tune or I don’t like their vibrato, and yet these days, I would much rather listen, for example, to Joseph Szigeti, for all his wobbling and shaking as he got older, than some technically perfect, sonically pure rendition. His humanity and personality speak to me beyond any flaws in his violin playing. I am grateful for this change in perspective, which is undoubtedly one of the benefits of ageing. Charlie Chaplin was a notorious perfectionist, retaking scenes hundreds of times sometimes, but he was keenly sensitive to the importance of the bigger picture. In an interview in 1921 he explained: ‘I want every bit rehearsed thoroughly, all the technical details worked out very carefully. Then, when all those bits of business have been gone through thoroughly, I say, “Now we’ll act it.” But I don’t want perfection of detail in the acting. I’d hate a picture that was perfect – it would seem machine made. I want the human touch, so that you love the picture for its imperfections.’ Art is defined by the human touch. I’ve recently been interviewing players of the Academy of Ancient Music for the CD booklets of their Mozart Piano Concerto project with Robert Levin, which they’re continuing after a 20-year hiatus. In my interview with violinist Bill Thorp, he described Levin coming back to the project after all these years, saying, ‘He played with all the fluency, facility and inventiveness that he always has done, but there was an added dimension that made it even more moving. Maybe one’s life experiences go into one’s playing, so it’s not surprising that with age and experience there’s more depth. Just as old instruments sound better because of their age, players can move you more as they get older, because they can say more. I find Bob’s playing even more touching now. What is music, after all? It’s about life, experience and emotion.’ To illustrate the latest release, the AAM have commissioned an animation from André Beukes that also rather beautifully demonstrates the point. At the start, we see a young Robert Levin at the keyboard, playing the slow movement of K467, one of Mozart’s most sublime movements. As time and music pass, the supposed camera pans round him and an older man emerges, slightly more hunched and careworn, but just as intent on his work. The film is made of 1,500 drawings – some descriptive and clear; some messy splodges and abstract colour washes that look like they took seconds. Our eyes piece them into a story that is both specific to the project, but also gets to the very heart of the matter. Life, music, humanity – full of splotches, voids, mess and inconsistency amid moments of extreme beauty. That’s the point, and ChatGPT will never get it.

A visit to Oslo for Dextra Musica's Master to Master exhibition left me feeling envious of the Norwegian culture of philanthropy and the very real difference it makes What would you do if you had all the money in the world? I like to think that once I’d cured poverty and disease (and had a few nice holidays) I’d pump the rest into classical music and sharing its many benefits. Norway’s DNB Savings Bank Foundation doesn’t have all the money in the world, but it has a lot, and it’s doing just that. The foundation has spent more than NOK 8bn (more than £6bn) on philanthropy since it was founded in 2002 and in 2005 it created Dextra Musica to collect the finest stringed instruments in the world for Norwegian musicians to play. Dextra now owns 121 instruments and from 4 to 19 February, many of these 300-year-old Italian cousins were brought together for a family reunion at Master to Master, in the impressive new National Museum in Oslo. The busy schedule offered an exhibition, several daily concerts, walks, talks, children’s events and a three-day Violin Symposium, which I was invited to chair. One of the key creative drives behind the event was to explore and enjoy the connections between music and art. Classic violins and native Hardanger fiddles were juxtaposed with music-themed paintings by Norwegian artists, most taken from the foundation’s art collection, Dextra Artes. This was not a silent assembly, though – the whole museum rang with music several times a day, with young players performing among the paintings and instruments, including, most appropriately, Peder Severin Krøyer’s painting of the Neruda Quartet in concert. (This audio-visual layering is part of the wider philosophy of the new museum, with each room having its own soundscape to contextualise the carefully curated content.) Audiences crammed eagerly into every space to listen, at a safe distance from the main cases, which showed off four quartets by the Stradivari, Gofriller, Guadagnini and Guarneri families, many owned by Dextra. To have one of these quartets on display would be fortunate, but to be able to bask in the golden glow of four was almost overwhelming, especially with their celebrity players including Jacqueline du Pré and Guilhermina Suggia. During the day, cases would be emptied in a military procedure involving conservators, luthiers and somewhat officious security guards (this is the museum where the Scream was famously stolen in 1994, after all) to relay the instruments back to their players for the evening concerts in the museum’s auditorium. There’s nothing particularly new about banks and individuals investing in instruments. It often entails buying a Strad and locking it up only to be played twice a year, or offering it to a player with conditions and insurance attached while waiting for a good time to sell and leaving the player bereft. What is unusual about the instruments in Dextra’s collection, is that they stay in the hands of their players 360 days of the year, the other 5 committed to the service of the community. Insurance and maintenance costs are covered and as they are non-profit investments, the instruments are not likely to be sold. The question of who gets to play history’s best violins seems to me a unique moral conundrum. These instruments hold various meanings – as history, art, craft, engineering and music tools all rolled into one. It’s hard to think of any other objects that function in these multiple ways. They are sometimes at odds, though. On one hand, it is sad if a beautiful old instrument can’t fulfil its function of creating music – the pure but silent ‘Messiah’ Stradivari at the Ashmolean is a symbol of impotence. On the other, playing an old instrument risks the history it bears and its future, whether through accident or the daily wear of temperature, sweat and friction. So who should get to play these old instruments? The richest? Most famous? Best? Most careful? The foundation’s solution seems typically fair and meritocratic. Soloists and orchestral principals play the finest instruments while the good ones are played by up-and-coming players. With canny vision, Dextra is also collecting instruments by some of today’s leading makers, which are given to conservatoire students to break in and find their own sound. There is a certain amount of subjectivity and mythology to instrument sound, anyway – not all old Italian instruments sound great and people are more likely to like a violin if they see ‘Strad’ in the programme. But also, there isn’t. The due diligence Dextra does on provenance, condition and sound ensures their instruments are the finest examples, and you could hear the quality. Their extensive Rolodex of great instruments also afforded the luxury of hearing whole families of instruments – Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence on Guadagninis, a Schubert quintet on Strads, a Dvořák quintet on Guarneris. It’s hard to overstate how extraordinary this kind of assembly is. For the luthiers gathered for the symposium it was a form of nirvana. Poring over these instruments in a case with a mobile phone light is one thing, but to correlate what they see with what they hear is the missing link of violin making, and there was plenty of excited chat in the intervals about what we heard. The Strads sounded sweet, round, deep and direct; the Guarneris a little darker and grittier; the Guadagninis maybe less coloured and the Gofrillers slightly more raw. This is the kind of knowledge that may well improve the violins of the future – especially for the young Norwegian luthiers who had been invited to the symposium. The symposium itself offered three packed days of insights from the world’s leading violin experts, ranging from the history of lutherie and stories of specific makers to the latest research into Cremonese varnish and dendrochronology. Aside from the instruments, what struck me in every performance was the sheer quality and consistency of the playing, whether at senior or student level. I didn’t hear a single note that wasn’t beautifully coloured, a phrase that wasn’t carefully shaped, ensemble that wasn’t attentive or balance that wasn’t perfectly gauged. Whatever the Barratt Due Institute of Music and Norwegian Academy of Music are doing, they’re doing it remarkably well. And I can’t prove that the money Dextra invests in instruments makes musicians play better, but I’ll wager that having such tools at their disposal – alongside good teaching – inspires them to do better. Of the 100 events and 200 concerts alongside the exhibition, many were for children – there was even a gingerbread violin making challenge in the run up. This inclusivity is not surprising when you read the foundation’s goals for the arts, which include ‘enabling creative expressions at all levels, attracting new types of audience and strengthening the arenas where the public meets the art’. It funds a whole programme of concerts, summer schools, local choirs, marching bands and youth orchestras at every level, supervised by the Dextra board. It even runs a cultural centre in Oslo, Sentralen, on the premises of the old Cristiana Sparebank, with five floors of performance spaces and offices for cultural entrepreneurs, where it holds concerts. This is trickledown economics in action and serves as a lesson in how to make classical music a natural and healthy part of everyone’s lives, while also promoting excellence. Maybe it’s unique to Norway, whose banks have a long-held tradition of philanthropic giving and where classical and folk seem to sit side-by-side (as they did in the exhibition), avoiding specious arguments about the cultural elitism of classical music. As funding and political support for music education in the UK evaporates while the five main banks report record profits of £37bn, it’s certainly hard not to look on with grim envy. To conflate sayings, money equals power and with power comes responsibility. It seems that Dextra knows how to wield all three – with vision, imagination, integrity and generosity. In the UK, maybe we can hope that Mr Barclay or Ms Lloyd is reading and dreams of creating their own cultural impact, and – when it comes to classical music – love. My visit to Oslo was paid for by Dextra Music.

There are many good reasons for music colleges to include adult learners, so why do they seem reluctant? ‘I love the idea of building ecosystems. We now have sounds resonating from people who wouldn’t have come to the Academy unless they were bringing in a student or visiting for a concert. Suddenly, they’re contributors, engaging with us’ – the words of Brendan Breslin, who runs Royal Irish Academy of Music’s new Adult Division. I went to visit in October, during its first term, and have written articles for Music Teacher (online) and BBC Music Magazine (February issue). As a keen amateur violinist, I’ve been banging on about how music organisations should integrate adult learners for a while now (17 Reasons to Love Amateur Musicians), but as far as I have been able to discover, of conservatoires, only Juilliard has a dedicated adult faculty. So I was obviously incredibly excited to see RIAM taking up the gauntlet. To me, it seems such a win-win-win. Conservatoires make money and reach new audiences and donors; young students learn to teach and engage with listeners and potential sponsors, and even to understand some of the deeper values of music; and adult learners derive the many benefits of learning an instrument and being part of a community. In an increasingly apocalyptical-feeling era, with education and arts funding in dire straits, music careers stymied on every front, mental health crises in young and old, and a looming elderly care emergency, the idea of an ecosystem in which music learners of every stripe not only co-exist, but also support each other, seems only positive. What are the obstacles? I concede there may be a practical one of the sheer physical resources of having more people and classes in buildings with limited spaces. I imagine there are ways round this, though, especially when profits are involved, and ways of working out peaks and troughs of demand. I suspect a greater barrier is an attitude – a sense in conservatoires that adult learners and amateurs might somehow infect their star students with inexactitude, undermining their Olympian ideals. I asked Breslin about this and he was quite certain: ‘I don’t believe there’s any sense in which this opportunity is bad for the students who are performance focused. It gives them an opportunity to have different conversations, and collaborations that will empower them in terms of employability.’ There may also be a lack of understanding of the substantial diversity of the amateur market, ranging from the absolute beginner to players who (like me) have been through those very conservatoire walls but chosen other ways to make money. It’s the latter that possibly offer more of an existential threat. After all, if conservatoires are not producing great professional musicians, what are they doing? Adult learners might not look as lithe and fashionable as young students in marketing brochures, or have as bright futures, but they have equally remarkable stories. I found it incredibly moving listening to classes in Dublin as the students conquered the tunes they were learning and told me how they had turned (or returned) to playing – as well as how much better it made them feel. The two sets aren’t in competition, though – quite the opposite. When I interviewed Brett Yang of the phenomenally successful TwoSet Violin for BBC Music Magazine, he explained, ‘Everyone’s scrambling for what’s there but what we did, unintentionally at the beginning, was to increase that pie so that more people come into the world of classical music and there’s more for everyone.’ Conservatoires have the opportunity to grow the pie by creating inclusive, diverse communities, without necessarily losing their focus on quality. Of course, I might be very wrong, and for now the Adult Division is in experimental mode. The range and number of courses are fairly limited and there is a lot of flexibility around supply and demand. Breslin is sanguine in his belief that it will take five years to understand the market fully and ten years to know if the division has been successful. But in the meantime, even having an Adult Division section on the website makes these classes more than a few random calendar dates. It signifies a hope, an intention, an invitation. We exist and are seen. The ecosystem – and the pie – just got a bit bigger.

A plea to end the wispy-bulgy school of violin playing Is there a particular sound that makes you reach for the radio off button? For me, nothing (well, apart from the Archers theme) makes me leap across a room faster than a particular violin sound that seems to have become popular with some young string players in the last decade or so. Individual notes bulge, starting with no vibrato and accelerating into full wobble; quiet notes have no bow pressure and a floaty-wispy sound; individual notes are attacked with random emphasis; speeds are pulled around; phrasing makes no sense. The effect for me is fussy and distracting and I feel seasick. (I won’t name individual artists, but spend a day listening to Radio 3 and you’ll hear what I mean.) In an article for BBC Music Magazine that has just gone online, I talked to a range of musicians about how – and why – string sound has evolved over the last generations, touching on some of the reasons for this. My first inkling that I wasn’t alone in this aversion was watching Alfred Brendel coaching a young quartet. They were playing a Beethoven pianissimo dynamic marking without any vibrato and he put them straight. Giving me quotes for my article, he described ‘an artificial, lifeless sound on long, sustained notes, averse to any cantabile. It has become, for quite a few players, standard practice in pianissimo sections. The sound, instead of ominous or mysterious, becomes dead. What is lost in this kind of playing is a great deal of warmth, colour, character and nuance.’ It would be easy to characterise this sound as coming out of historically informed performance practice, especially the (mis)conception that vibrato was verboten. In reality, none of the great period performers and orchestras I’ve heard actually play like this. As Antje Weithaas explains in my article, historical awareness has only opened up more flexible, context-specific approaches to sound. But maybe this sound world is a hand-me-down version of the real thing – young players picking up tricks and techniques without understanding the real context. Rehearsal shorthand becomes the norm and we have fake Baroque (although it has crept into all eras of music). Another possibility, which several interviewees mention, is that with so many alternative recordings available at a click, historic and otherwise, young players increasingly feel the need to distinguish themselves and sound different, pushing their sonic range to extremes – marketing more than music. Or perhaps it is a question of changing taste, the need for fresh ideas and revolutions – and inevitable backlashes. Mini-skirts are followed by flares, just as Heifetz’s incandescence is followed by Perlman’s gorgeous golden syrup. I’m not sure where that analogy takes us now – maybe to Vivienne Westwood, all punk and edge, a rebellion against smooth expressiveness. And maybe that’s natural. I know my taste has changed over the years. I fell in love with the violin because of Perlman but now I sometimes find that sound – and the generations of players it inspired – almost too intense. My go-to of the old school would be Szigeti or Kreisler. There may also be technical issues. On one hand, technical standards are generally far higher than even a generation ago, and yet not all young players learn a good legato, so fundamental to phrasing. Levon Chilingirian explained: ‘We’re weaker generally in bow technique – playing from the middle to the tip of the bow, sustaining and how much to press with a bow. We tend to play more off-the-string strokes so when it’s necessary to resort to the lower half of the bow, we don’t have as much control as we should when necessary.’ Another aspect is the pulling around of tempos, as Chilingirian said: ‘Some people think it’s a free for all when it comes to a pulse when playing a Haydn quartet, for example, adding what they think are musical stops, starts, pauses and unnatural rhythmic devices. Silence in Haydn, particularly, is incredibly important, but you should play in tempo around the silences and not do the inevitable ritardando and so-called ‘magical moment’. There’s a lot of that about at the moment.’ It would take a whole thesis to distinguish between sound and music, but for me, the greatest players tell stories with their phrasing and colours, whether speaking or singing, at the service of the composer, of course. The main problem with the wispy-bulgy style is that sound effects get in the way of phrases and the music itself. One of the greatest musical lessons I ever learnt was with my former band, Los Desterrados. We used to arrange our own versions of old Sephardic songs and loved doing clever things with the melodies and structures. One day, a renowned New York singer came to a rehearsal and she was bemused by what we were trying to do. ‘Just play the song,’ she told us. And she was absolutely right. Music shouldn’t be about ego and gimmicks. I’d love to tell these players, ‘Just play the song!’

Cate Blanchett takes up a baton for the story of Lydia Tár but misses the fire of a great conductor and underplays the struggles of female conductors in Todd Field’s new film, Tár I went into Tár feeling sympathetic towards Marin Alsop’s view that in terms of authenticity, the lead character – a selfish, power-playing conductor – should obviously have been a man. I came out thinking that a bigger problem wasn’t so much the sex of the lead character as the lack of it. Ridiculous as it sounds – you heard it here first – Cate Blanchett isn’t very sexy in the role. Charisma, charm, magnetism, personality, sex appeal – whatever you want to call it, there’s an intangible something about great conductors. They look you in the eye and you will do anything for them. It’s one of the most important tools in their armoury and one of the reasons that musical relationships often cross boundaries. Blanchett is all subtle glances, tension and tics. She does well with the physicality of conducting and her baton work is nearly convincing, but she lacks the quality that allows conductors to get away with what they want in the first place (paradoxically, since it also defines Hollywood stars) – charisma. The elegant angles of her face remain Sphinx-like throughout, as rigid and cold as the walls of her beautiful brutalist Berlin apartment. She’s more likely to lecture her musicians than to lure them into submission through the sheer force of her will, as great conductors do – male or female. It’s hard to know whether this is intentional. Is it an observation about female conductors not being able to be as free and insistently themselves as men? Is it to describe Tár’s specific cold personality (she keeps everyone at a distance, even her daughter, who calls her Lydia)? Or is it suggesting she’s at a particular point of crisis? I’m not sure. The consequence is that it feels like two overlapping films. One is about conductors and the power games they play; the other about a successful, complex, middle-aged woman watching (or maybe precipitating) her carefully assembled life fall apart. Blanchett seems more successful in the latter, especially as the end unfolds and we learn more of her back story, but she blanches from the real nastiness and discomfort of the former, where punches are pulled. There’s a moral ambiguity to the story that would certainly be less convincing if the protagonist were a man. That seems to be the intention. On Woman’s Hour, Blanchett explained that they couldn’t have examined the ‘corrupting nature of power in as nuanced a way... if there was a male because we understand what that looks like’. As I understand her, power play and abuse by male conductors is so obvious and normal that to make it interesting they had to make the lead character female. Maybe the nuance makes it more compelling for a general audience, but it is also less convincing for those of us who observe the business. Blanchett went on to say, ‘It’s a meditation on power and power is genderless.’ This might be true in the theatre world, but it’s certainly not the case in classical music. Most egregiously of all, one of Tár’s diatribes in the film is about how women conductors of the previous generation – name checking Alsop and Nathalie Stutzmann – had it easy and stood on the shoulders of Nadia Boulanger. This is so patently false that it’s either supposed to convey Tár’s own skewed thinking or to justify the premise of the gender swap. Either way, it misrepresents a business that is only in this generation coming to terms with equality, and still has a long way to go. (Some statistics from ISM here: of discriminatory incidents, 96% identified male perpetrators and 4% female; 11.2% of UK conductors are women.) You can see why Alsop (the first female conductor to lead the last night of the BBC Proms as recently as 2013) is miffed. One of the few experiences I’ve had of her conducting was watching a concerto competition where performance after performance, the male concertmaster would wait until the exact moment that Alsop raised her baton to push his spectacles up his nose, forcing her to wait – clear power play. He did this several times until finally, Alsop bounded on to the platform and started without him. Maybe that kind of thing happens with male conductors, but I doubt it. It served as a reminder of the battles women conductors have had to face. To downplay that struggle is quite wrong. That said, I enjoyed Tár. It’s strikingly filmed, with Berlin Brandenburg Film Commission’s money well spent – Berlin looks beautifully blue and achingly cool. The scenes shot around music – rehearsals in the Berlin Philharmonie, auditions, meetings or backstage – feel real and normal. That’s just as well, because I could fill the Albert Hall with the holes in the dialogue, albeit not as bad as previous representations of classical music. ‘I’m suspicious of the E natural in the cello line,’ Tár says after a rehearsal, or ‘I managed to pull from the strings in the last movement’ and ‘They’re getting caught up in the power of your glissando.’ Unlike most professional musicians I’ve spent time with, these ones talk about music out of the blue the whole time – pulling out academic references about Beethoven and Mozart over lunch, vindicating Furtwangler over coffee or popping in specially to point out that the clarinet was too loud in the slow movement. There’s a classic cliché when Tár is stuck composing on her piano and hears an alarm in a neighbouring flat that gives her the inspiration for her next phrase – Cary Grant did something similar in the Cole Porter biopic Night and Day (given they included some Cole Porter in the soundtrack I wonder if this was intentional). There are other inventions. Tár is seen with a plaster on her baton finger – has anyone ever wielded a baton so hard they needed a plaster? And I wonder which orchestras go into rehearsal without knowing what repertoire they’re going to perform. My personal favourite is the copy of The Baton magazine she picks up at a newsagent stand that is full of classical music titles. As a former Editor of a magazine called The Strad, I dream of such a world. Alsop is upset that the details of Tár’s life match hers: the researchers were obviously aiming at verisimilitude, often sailing close to the wind. Characters include Andris Davis and amateur conductor Elliot Kaplan, and there’s a discussion about James Levine and Charles Dutoit, as well as a side-reference to Plácido Domingo. Tár makes fun of Michael Tilson Thomas’s symphonic endings and dismisses the sexy publicity photos of artists including Janine Jansen. There’s a little historically accurate vignette about blind auditions being undermined by the sound of shoes and a nod to Dudamel lining up his dolls like an orchestra as a child. All nice touches for us geeks (although the ending is so unconvincing as to be like a bad punchline.) How will this all go down with non-classically oriented viewers? They might come out with some understanding of what classical music does, although ironically the best explanation of this comes late on with a long clip of Leonard Bernstein’s iconic lectures. If they come out thinking that female conductors are the same as male conductors, they will certainly have a distorted view. But as someone who moans on about the lack of classical music in everyday life, I can only be pleased that Tár is out and getting so much attention. I can also look forward to my next concert with Corinthian Chamber Orchestra – with a real and convincing female conductor (Rebecca Tong).

The death of violin expert Norman Rosenberg marks the end of an era and raises questions for the violin world There are some people who pass through the classical music world discreetly and largely unknown, and yet their death leaves us intrinsically, even if imperceptibly, worse off. Norman Rosenberg, who died on 17 February at the age of 95, was one such man. It’s unlikely most musicians knew who he was. He leaves barely a trace on Google. String players might have tried to borrow or buy an instrument from him – he encouraged many budding professionals over the years. Violin dealers and experts were used to seeing his slight figure wandering around London auction viewings. And astute buyers might have stood nearby to try to overhear his observations and catch a sleeper sale or other useful information. Norman could spot the make and authenticity of an instrument across a crowded room, just as most of us recognise faces. A good expert notices every tool mark, shade, curve and measurement and be able to attribute those details to a specific maker and even year. An expert such as Norman is able to put that information in the context of every instrument they’ve ever seen and the entire history of violin making. They file each new piece of information for future reference so they can spot every substituted scroll, fake front or restored bass-bar crack that might stymie value. That’s why Norman’s evaluations were trusted by players and dreaded by competitors. Where did he find his love of instruments? The biographical details I have come from the eulogy written by his wife, Rosella. He was born on 21 October 1926 in Liverpool to a Jewish family that originally came from Kovna in Lithuania (now Kaunas). His grandfather and father owned antique shops, his father sometimes selling violins, as did his uncle Willy, who was also a dentist. As a child Norman was taken round art galleries, which no doubt sharpened his visual senses. He taught himself the violin from the Carl Flesch system and listened to recordings of Heifetz and Kreisler. This may account for his good judgement of the sound of instruments (not a given with violin experts). He already had the instrument bug as a child, as he told me when I interviewed him for The Strad in 2010: ‘As a provincial schoolboy on the 1930s, my main connections with the violin world were the Liverpool Philharmonic and three violin shops including Rushworth and Dreaper, where I bought The Strad with sixpence from my pocket money. In those days The Strad had a service called Answers to Correspondents. I wrote asking about a maker and received a most helpful reply.’ In 1941 the family moved to Bangor in Northern Ireland to escape the Liverpool Blitz, and Norman went to work at Short & Harland, making Spitfire parts. After the war, aged 22, he went to London, where his first port of call was The Strad office, then in Islington, under editor Eric Lavender. He used to tell me the story of how they had on their wall a picture of the ‘Balfour’ Stradivari, which was a notorious Voller fake. Norman asked Lavender about it and was told, ‘We’ve got that there to remind us about the hazards of the business.’ He was of course teaching me a lesson in my role as Editor, and it was duly noted. Norman sold his first instrument in 1946, buying it at auction for £4, setting it up properly and selling it for £8. The obsession had become a profession. He married Rosella in 1977, and even on their honeymoon in Scotland, he managed to find some instruments to bring back. I remember visits to Norman as a child, as my older brother Rafael spent hours trying instruments and bows. One would hear the same stories and Norman might sometimes play his own ‘Song of the Violin’, one of the few things that Google turns up about him (I think he would grin mischievously at that irony). Getting him to show you instruments or bows could be like pulling teeth, though – for an instrument dealer he seemed remarkably reluctant actually to sell anything. They were his friends and you had to bide your time in order to be introduced. Eventually, when I contemplated going to the Royal Academy of Music and was in the market for an instrument that wasn’t my brother’s hand-me-down, I went to see Norman for myself. He handed me a Sebastian Klotz violin and said, ‘You’ll like this’, and I did. I still play it and love it, and Norman was absolutely right. A dealer who can match a buyer with ‘their sound’ in a decent instrument at a fair price is pretty much the Holy Grail for players. As Editor of The Strad, I sometimes went round auction viewings with him, hoping for the inside scoop on instruments and dealers. He invariably kept shtum, his eyes twinkling as he pretended not to hear my questions. He knew the violin dealers’ Omertà. He was the perennial outsider, eschewing the agreements, deals, understandings, nods and winks of the violin trade (as far as I know, of course), but he wasn’t going to snitch. The violin market has certainly changed since Norman sold his first instrument in 1946. There are more people around the world who think they can make a quick buck from dealing, and that didn’t please him. Maybe that diversity is a good thing, redistributing wealth and opportunities and forcing change within the boy’s club. It does, however, raise existential questions about expertise. After all, knowledge is not fairly distributed. It’s hard-won by hours of study, experience, obsession, discourse and time spent up close with fine instruments. There is also an element of native talent, whether that boils down to a photographic memory, and good eyes and ears, or something more intangible. Whatever it is, Norman had it, but how many of the newer entrants do? On the positive side, scientific developments mean there are more objective measures – dendrochronology to pin down date ranges, scanning to analyse and compare materials at a micro level, and other new tools. But data still need to be interpreted and when these interpretations mean the difference between £100k and £1m in someone’s pocket, there are difficult decisions to be made. The instrument world is certainly more transparent than it used to be – forced, perhaps by the amount of information and photography online – and collaborative decisions can be made quickly, which might help. Knowledge may be power but epistemologically speaking, the truth is that we never really know that we know the truth about any instrument. Having a group of experts debate and collectively conclude an attribution can lead to the most likely truth possible. But even that may be compromised if some or all of those experts stand to profit from the collective conclusion, and that is a fundamental tension in the violin world. That’s why it needs people a little outside the establishment, who have the knowledge, authority, trustworthiness and sometimes sheer obstinacy to challenge the consensus. Norman stood his ground and did so with a code of honour that always put him on the side of players over the business. One of the strangest things about mortality is how a lifetime of knowledge such as Norman’s just disappears – it is a terrible irony that in his last years he had Alzheimer’s Disease. The loss is that of his family and those who knew him well. But it’s also a loss for the violin world and its history, too – as if an enormous computer server of institutional memory has been wiped clean. Who has that type of expertise now? The violin world is a lesser place without him – less knowledgeable, possibly less decent and certainly less charming. Photo: courtesy Rosella Rosenberg

With classical music forced out of the concert hall, one of the few positives of this year has been rediscovering it in the wild This year, I’ve watched my entire industry collapse. In the absence of live communal playing, musicians and groups have desperately tried to find ways to communicate across the screen, but here’s my terrible confession: outside of my work, I’ve hardly interacted with any of it. This is not because of its quality or intention, but because I haven’t felt like it. This terrible and surreal year has changed my relationship with classical music entirely, but not only in bad ways. Normally I’d go to a couple of concerts a week, for both work and pleasure. I’d play in an amateur concert every couple of months, with occasional chamber music and irregular boot camp of scales and studies to keep in shape. This year I’ve barely picked up my violin. Here’s another terrible confession: I don’t feel like I miss either experience. For my own sake, this is alarming because the violin and going to concerts are at the core of my identity. More importantly, if it’s this easy for me to be without live classical music, what does the future hold for those of us who work in this world? What if people let go and don’t come back? ‘The only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance of not having what one loves is not to feel anything’ There is an alternative interpretation, of course. When passions run deep, sometimes the only way to deal with loss is to go into a form of denial. The only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance of not having what one loves is not to feel anything. I have adapted and when the time comes, I expect to be full of joy again – maybe even more so. Full-body experience There have been positives to this adaptation. Banned from concert halls, I’ve taken it outdoors. On my frequent Hampstead Heath walks, accompanied by my iPhone and Apple Music subscription, I binge sets of symphonies. These have mainly been standard composers (Sibelius, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Mahler, Brahms) but it’s been revelatory and liberating. ‘If a deranged-looking woman dances to Mahler in a forest and no one sees her, is she really dancing?’ Listening to classical music has become a full-body experience. Walking through nature, alone, unnoticed, focused only on sound and surroundings, rather than watching musicians or the conductor, I connect directly with the music and nature. Released from the constraints of sitting in an audience, or even in an orchestra, where too much movement is annoying for others, I walk in time to the music, wave my arms around wildly and air paint the themes with my hands. If I seem crazy, I don’t care. If a deranged-looking woman dances to Mahler in a forest and no one sees her, is she really dancing? Sheila Nelson, my first violin teacher, died recently, and among the memories this sparked, were of the many games she played with us in which we walked and moved to the rhythm. This was her way of hard-wiring a sense of pulse into our very beings. I know from experience that not all musicians have this and it’s one of the many things she taught for which I’m grateful. ‘Moving to classical music outdoors is exhilarating, but it also expresses something of the physical and spiritual sides of classical music that often get lost in the concert hall’ Walking through the woods, marching, waltzing or quickstepping to the great composers is a grown-up version of the games we played back in Sheila’s drawing room. Moving to classical music outdoors is exhilarating, but it also expresses something of the physical and spiritual sides of classical music that often get lost in the concert hall. Classical music is more primitive than we like to think, and maybe if we tapped into that, more people would fall under its spell. I would love to hear a symphony performed under a canopy of trees on the Heath (and it could easily be Covid-compliant). I only worry about how I will sit still when I do go back to a concert hall. At one with nature Another aspect of this physical connection I’ve experienced with classical music on my walks is how well these great works suit wild landscapes. We know that composers such as Beethoven, Mahler and Brahms were inspired by nature, so it makes total sense to listen to them in that context. ‘Being outdoors as the wind and rain buffet, trees loom, lakes glisten and birds fly past is all the narrative you need to understand Sibelius’ As a classical music journalist and marketer, I’ve often described the stories of music, but there’s a lot to be said for saying nothing. Being outdoors as the wind and rain buffet, trees loom, lakes glisten and birds fly past is all the narrative you need to understand Sibelius. In this context, music becomes intrinsically wrapped up with nature, with the composer and with a wider perspective of humanity. Music streaming is life-changing This is not a popular opinion, but my Apple Music subscription has changed my life. Undoubtedly, musicians have been shafted by streaming services and the financial equation is horribly unfair. I resisted subscribing for a long time because of this, and because of the cost (yes, I’m full of contradictions). When I finally signed up, it took me a while to understand the full import, but this year I have fully embraced the infinite and exciting possibilities. ‘If I want to walk briskly, I find a disco playlist and suddenly I’m sashaying along the pavement like John Travolta’ When I’m walking, I can decide en route to listen to the complete symphonies of Vaughan Williams and within three clicks, I am hearing my chosen conductor. From deep in a forest I can text a friend for a recommendation and 30 seconds later I hear it. If I want to walk briskly, I find a disco playlist and suddenly I’m sashaying along the pavement like John Travolta. The freedom and possibilities are staggering. Of course, there needs to be a just renumeration for the artists, and there has been some progress in addressing this issue in the UK parliament, thanks to the Keep Music Alive campaign, and more needs to be done. But we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. We also have to find some way of getting these services to represent classical music better within their algorithms. For all the classical music I listen to on Apple, it always recommends pop and rock music and I imagine that’s worse for people who don’t listen to classical music. But just imagine if it came up higher – how many people would accidentally hear and like classical music? Amid all the death, loss, fear, loneliness, lack of governmental support and existential crisis, I try to find positives for 2021. This virus has caused a massive breach in all our usual habits, but maybe a fallow year can ultimately pave the way for abundant new, creative, genre-defying, category-busting, inclusive ideas. There is already evidence of this happening – I wrote about the young musicians such as Nicola Benedetti and Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who have made massive impact with their education initiatives, and about how performers can use this time to create unique content, which has ramped up this year. I also wrote about how much more visionary the business could be if it used the progressive Doughnut Economics model. Change has been slow and it has often felt as if there is a lack of leadership, but I want to believe good things will ultimately come out of this year – after all, what choice do we have?

The Doughnut theory of economics sets out principles and practical steps towards a sustainable, just and happy world. What can classical music learn from it? You wouldn’t think that a book on economics has much to say about classical music. Indeed, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics – Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist doesn’t directly, but there are many fascinating arguments and concepts that can be applied if you squint a little. It’s such a progressive, positive call to action to fix the world that it’s hard not to want it to work for our sector, which is manifestly broken at the moment. I’m not an economist – the fact that I finished the book is testament to the clarity of Raworth’s arguments – so you’ll have to read her book yourselves. What follows is my very loose understanding and wild extrapolation. Underlying our economic world views have been models and diagrams economists use to describe the world and educate its new generations. Raworth makes the point that such illustrations often inculcate assumptions and world views, rather than leading to new interpretations and better policy. Here, for example is Samuelson’s Circular Flow diagram – the first attempt, in 1948, to describe what was to become the field of macroeconomics. It shows a closed system whereby households work for their living and buy things with their wages, which go back to the businesses, give or take what they give to the government or put in the bank. However, it leaves out many of the resources on which we also rely – including the energy and planetary resources that make our existence possible in the first place. So she creates her own inclusive model, which she calls the Embedded Economy, which factors in elements such as the commons, society and Earth itself. Raworth’s central argument is that for too long economists have pursued the goal of the growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP – output), leading to wealth inequality and the perilous misuse of natural resources, and that a bigger, better goal is needed. This is where the Doughnut comes in (a ring one rather than jammy). Our goal should be living in the doughy bit of the Doughnut diagram, where everyone’s needs are met but we don’t encroach on the planet. It offers specific metrics for how we live this good life, where everyone has their physical and spiritual needs met without destroying the planet. I haven’t found any models of our world, but a primitive flow diagram along the lines of Samuelson’s diagram might look something like this: Put simply, musicians give audiences music and audiences pay musicians. That’s how it used to be, whether through live music or recordings. To the traditional conservatoire-led way of thinking, musicians either play or teach, with little crossover (I’ve written before about this paradox). Teaching is done in schools and conservatoires, and performances are given in venues and recording studios. However, of the many things the current crisis has taught us, the most important is that the model of ‘make music, get paid’ is more fragile than we ever imagined – in one fell swoop, performance life has been catastrophically devastated. Many people are valiantly doing creative and innovative things to survive, and teaching has adapted remarkably well, but the system is broken. What can we learn from the Doughnut? Raworth describes seven ways ‘to think like a 21st-century economist’. These have specific economic ramifications but it’s an interesting thought experiment to apply them to classical music. 1. Change the goal 2. See the big picture 3. Nurture human nature 4. Get savvy with systems 5. Design to distribute 6. Create to regenerate 7. Be agnostic about growth Change the goal/See the big picture In fact, the ‘make music, get paid’ system was broken pre-Covid. Streaming services make millions while musicians get paid micro-pennies; concert halls struggle to appeal to young audiences, who prefer the instant highs of TikTok; classical music has become a weapon in the culture wars, misrepresented and vilified from left and right; instrumental teaching is the preserve of the middle classes and arts subjects have been stripped from the syllabus. We need a bigger and better goal than simply being paid to make music or teach – a model that reaches far and wide and touches on the many important things that music offers. We need to change the goal, just as the Doughnut attempts to do on an even bigger scale. Nurture human nature Economists have always based their theories on a concept of a ‘rational economic man’ who functions only in self-interest, and Raworth describes this as inaccurate and outdated. To live in the tasty bit of the doughnut, we need a more sophisticated view of human beings and their needs and development. She asks, ‘What are the values, heuristics, norms and networks that currently shape human behaviour – and how could they be nurtured or nudged, rather than ignored and eroded.’ She cites psychologist Shalom Schwartz, who studied people across the world and found ten core values in their behaviour: self-direction, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, power, security, conformity, tradition, benevolence and universalism. All ten are present to different degrees in individuals and cultures, and change even over the course of the day. Music engages just about every single one of these, which is surely an argument for it being at the heart of any macro-economic modelling. Design to distribute In high-income countries the gap between rich and poor is at its highest for 30 years. So how do we how to distribute resources – whether knowledge, money or energy – more equitably? This isn’t just a charitable or moral imperative – it’s pragmatic. Raworth explains how scientists analysing natural ecosystems have concluded that the better their diversity and distribution, the more successful their entire system is. What does this look like for classical music? We all know we need more diversity in terms of the people who do it: it seems this is finally being addressed but it must be embedded in any modelling. Presumably, this theory also means we need diverse types, ways and formats, and that is something that we usually do well – on any given day in a big city, you would find a wide range of types of concert, whether quartets, orchestras or solo music, of music from every era. And distribution is easier than ever – the upside of the internet and digital tools that have decimated artists’ recording profits is that anyone can make a recording in their front room, or perform live, or teach, with relatively low costs attached. This has been one of the few positive developments throughout the Covid crisis, with music and music education widely available. But is there more we can do to distribute the experience of live music, once we’re back running again, and even within the current limitations? Maybe this is where our ecosystem should rely less on venues and big organisations and more on local networks of diverse performers. Create to regenerate Since the industrial revolution, our systems have been based on degenerative design, raiding the Earth’s resources – ‘take, make, use, lose’. In order to sustain a relationship with the planet, Raworth argues that we have to bring emissions way down to within planetary boundaries – ‘sufficient absolute decoupling’. The music business is fairly culpable in this matter. Should artists swan off to New York for a recital and back in a couple of days? Should orchestras fly to Japan for a tour of four concerts, skipping between each by plane? This crisis has put paid to that for now, but it’s also an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the way the business exists as a global enterprise. There’s a certain cognitive dissonance about this for me. I would be devastated not to see the great musicians of the world in our own concert halls. There has to be some sort of compromise that involves much more local playing and more consolidated tours that use more rail travel – maybe not the months-long train tours that players used to do, but something more environmentally efficient that ensures that as a business we significantly lower the emissions we cause. This debate is only slowly emerging in the sector, and there’s still a lot of denial. Our problem is one of regeneration, in another sense, too – of audiences and players. Raworth’s suggestion is co-optable: to be generous ‘by creating an enterprise that is regenerative by design, giving back to the living systems of which we are a part’. Her question is ‘how many diverse benefits can we layer into this?’ instead of ‘how much financial value can we extract?’ And that to me is the big question for designing a better model for the music world. How many musical benefits can we layer in, for every person, at every stage of life, in every area? What happens when we shift our concept away from being given money to make music into this broader, more generous concept? Raworth describes this happening not through textbooks but through innovative experiments, and the good news is that we are seeing more of these ideas and trials in the classical music world. They even seem to have increased through the current crisis. I wrote about how young stars such as Nicola Benedetti and Sheku Kanneh-Mason are taking on this responsibility here. The generous city A key concept of Doughnut Economics is the ‘generous city’, designed and built within the limits of its environment, offering renewable energy, affordable housing, cheap public transport, enterprise hubs and plenty of good jobs. The whole concept of value has been transformed from merely wealth into skills, knowledge, trust. No such city exists yet, but Raworth describes an experiment in Oberlin, Ohio, which in 2009 created a set of radical goals, including saving more carbon dioxide than it produced, growing 70% of the city’s food locally, conserving 20,000 acres of green space and reviving local culture and community, among other measures. Its purpose was to improve the resilience, prosperity and sustainability of the community. All of these are constantly monitored using specific metrics, with data available on the Environmental Dashboard, online and in civic buildings. They also created a new performing arts centre – because of course the arts are central to such a vision. If we were designing from scratch, what would our generous musical city look like? What would our dashboard look like? The improvement in well-being of elderly people in care homes? Hours of focus in the a classroom? Number of hours of instrumental teaching? Minutes of applause? Spare time spent playing by amateurs? It would certainly include emissions from musicians flying and driving. Investment Where will the money come for all of this? Something else this crisis has taught us, if we didn’t already know, is that we can’t rely on the UK government, which seems to be ideologically opposed to music education. In the Doughnut, regenerative enterprise does need financial investment, but from long-term investors who are looking for generating value including social and cultural, as well as fair financial return. Believe it or not, such banks exist already – Dutch bank Triodos and Florida’s First Green Bank, for example. There may also be fresh opportunities from shifting from thinking of music as a thing we sell to thinking of it as a service or an experience. For example, I recently wrote about the String Club, which basically offers musical childcare classes and camps and has been incredibly successful – while also building generations of children who are at home with music. And I recently heard a fascinating discussion of how Opera Australia has found new audiences by marketing its performances as experiences. Purists will rage against using music as a means to an end rather than an end in itself but as we face an existential fight for survival, I find this argument unfathomable and irresponsible. If we love classical music we should want as many people as possible to have access to it. We have to envisage and reinvent its future rather than hanging on to the past. That doesn’t stop anyone from pursuing excellence with integrity and historical awareness – it just means opening up more possibilities to more people. Maybe something like this: Finding the jam What does the Doughnut actually mean for our world? Internally, maybe it can give us new perspectives and tools by which to plan and campaign. Looking outwards, how do we get involved in the wider conversations of the Doughnut Economics movement, which now includes celebrity fans such at the Pope and David Attenborough, to make sure that music is at the heart of its metrics about social values? Maybe we can even shift the paradigm from ring doughnuts to jammy ones, where music is the sweet delicious jam in the middle.

Very sad news has come through that the great violin pedagogue Sheila Nelson died on 16 November, at the age of 84. By rights, Sheila would have spent her final years basking in the affection and gratitude of the many generations of professional and amateur musicians who were inspired by her. She would have toured the country dispensing wisdom about classroom string teaching for the organisations that are now attempting to solve the problems she’d resolved brilliantly decades ago. Governmental departments would have come to her to understand the importance of lifelong musical well-being. She would have been honoured officially around the world for the significant contribution she made to string pedagogy. As it was, she had Alzheimer’s Disease and spent the last seven years being looked after by her family, cruelly robbed of these satisfactions. Not that she would have had much truck with them – she was far too self-effacing and no-nonsense. I am one of the lucky ones who had Sheila as my first teacher. I wrote here about the Saturday mornings spent in her large house in Cromwell Avenue, crowding in for the fun and games of learning to play the violin, both individually and in groups. In the early years, it was mostly about fun – comedy props designed to position little hands properly, silly analogies involving animals, a Stetson hat to select the next child required to improvise, physical activity to encourage relaxation and good pulse, and lots of lots of circles in the air. Later on, there was serious chamber music crammed into every room of her house, and there were always performances, invariably ending with ice cream all round. It’s over 40 years since I enjoyed these fun and games, and yet hardly a day goes by that I don’t feel grateful. I still play chamber music with the friends I made there when I was five, as well as many other amateur friends I’ve made along the way – it didn’t take Covid to prove to me how important playing the violin and music are in my life. I’ve never had tension problems in my playing and have always enjoyed improvising and playing concerts, unlike many musicians. Sheila’s great achievement was to make sure that music (classical music, at that) was always fun, joyful, physical, sociable, satisfying. It might not sound surprising, but it is not a given. Her way of teaching meant that playing the violin was not only something that little kids wanted to do – they didn’t want to stop doing it. She did that for me and my middle-class friends whose parents were willing to drive up to Highgate twice a week. And she did it with as much passion – maybe more – for the less-privileged kids she taught through her pioneering Tower Hamlets String Teaching Project (you can read my mother’s article about that here). She had a truly democratic vision of music for being for everyone. That might seem self-evident to most of us, but it’s a legacy for which we have to fight harder than ever. I got to meet Sheila again at the European String Teachers Association summer conference in 2010, when I was still Editor of The Strad. I sat with her at lunch, and when we were suddenly left on our own together, I managed to stumble out some inarticulate words of appreciation – how does one put that sort of sentiment? I don’t know how it came across or if she took them in properly, but I’m glad I had the chance to say something to her while she still had the capacity to understand. I just hope that one day soon her students and colleagues will all be able to celebrate the enormity of her impact on our lives.

Charlie Chaplin‘s 1917 film about the journey to Ellis Island is as funny and moving today as it must have been to the audiences who saw it when it opened – and just as relevant This essay was written as programme notes for a project of the pianist Gabriela Montero, who improvises to the film as part of a recital of Rachmaninov, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. Sadly many of her performances this year were cancelled owing to Covid. There are 40 seconds in The Immigrant that encapsulate exactly why I fell in love with Charlie Chaplin, just as millions across the world have done before me. As the boat bringing the Tramp and his fellow immigrants nears the United States, the Statue of Liberty comes into view – Charlie bites his lip with emotion, but the moment is broken as the stewards pen them in like cattle. Charlie asserts himself in typical slapstick fashion: the kick to the backside of the authority figure. Hope, anger, irony, rebellion, courage, childishness, comedy – all crammed into one little sequence. In all his films, Chaplin constantly flits like this between aspects of the human spirit and bigger social issues, using infinite shades of light and dark. Without speaking a word, he says the most profound things about us. His sympathy is always with the underdog, in this case beleaguered people coming to the US. When filming started in 1917, the US Immigrant Act had just been passed, restricting the entry of ‘undesirables’, people from Asia and the illiterate, so the issue he is describing was very real. And yet he also allows us to laugh at the seasick old man, murderous gamblers and the difficulties of trying to eat during a storm. Chaplin’s own arrival in the US was far more agreeable. He first landed in 1910 on the SS Cairnrona, aged only 21 but already an up-and-coming star of the London music hall, as part of Fred Karno’s prestigious vaudeville troupe (alongside Stan Laurel of later Laurel and Hardy fame). Variety wrote of his performance in The Wow-Wows, or A Night in a London Secret Society, that ‘Chaplin will do all right for America.’ His first North American tour lasted 21 months, and he returned only a few months later, in October 1912, never to live in his homeland again. His comedic talent was spotted by Keystone Film Company scouts and in September 1913 he signed a contract for $150 a week as an actor. From that point, his rise was meteoric. In 1916 he joined Mutual with a salary of $675,000 to make 12 two-reel comedies – which would include The Immigrant – making him one of the best-paid people in the world. In June 1917 he signed to First National to make eight films for $1m, with his own studio and total control over his own films. He was living the archetypal American dream. ‘He spent much of his childhood shuttling between various institutions for destitute children‘ His wild success is even more surprising given the intense poverty and hardship in which he grew up. The son of music hall entertainers, he was brought up by his mother Hannah Chaplin, but when he was only seven, she had a breakdown and he was sent to the Lambeth Workhouse with his older brother Syd. He spent much of his childhood shuttling between various institutions for destitute children, and the care of his alcoholic father, also Charles. Maybe as an escape from all of this, he developed a bug for performing and joined the Eight Lancashire Lads clog-dancing troupe, touring England with them at the age of ten. By 13 he had abandoned education, although he remained an auto-didact throughout his life and enjoyed peppering his writings and interviews with unusual words that make him sound somewhat pretentious. He was also passionate about music from an early age, writing in his autobiography about the moment he fell in love with it: ‘I suddenly became aware of a harmonica and a clarinet playing a weird, harmonious message… It was played with such feeling that I became conscious for the first time of what melody really was. My first awakening to music.’ ‘Debussy came to see him backstage and told him: ‘You are instinctively a musician and a dancer‘ His musicality was self-evident – when he was still working with Karno on tour in Paris in 1909, Debussy came to see him backstage and told him: ‘You are instinctively a musician and a dancer.’ Nijinsky once told him, ‘Your comedy is balletic, you are a dancer’. Chaplin taught himself violin, cello and piano, as he explains: ‘Since the age of sixteen I had practised from four to six hours a day in my bedroom. Each week I took lessons from the theatre conductor or from someone he recommended. As I played left handed, my violin was strung left handed with the bass bar and sounding post reversed. I had great ambitions to be a concert artist, or, failing that, to use it in a vaudeville act, but as time went on I realised that I could never achieve excellence, so I gave it up.’ He even plays the violin in two films – the 1916 The Vagabond and 1952 Limelight, but over time his interest in music transferred towards composing, and he wrote beautiful, evocative scores for his feature films, as well as later in life going back to score many that originally featured a live accompanist. At one point, he even owned a music publishing company, which published his tunes, including ‘Oh, that cello’. A studio press release written in 1917, just after The Immigrant was finished, stated: ‘His chief hobby, however, is found in his violin. Every spare moment away from the studio is devoted to this instrument. He does not play from notes excepting in a very few instances. He can run through selections of popular operas by ear and if in the humor, can rattle off the famous Irish jig or some negro selection with the ease of a vaudeville entertainer. Chaplin admits that as a violinist he is no Kubelik or Elman but he hopes, nevertheless, to lay in concerts some day before very long.’ ‘Even in those early comedies I strove for a mood; usually music created it. An old song called Mrs Grundy created the mood for The Immigrant‘ Indeed, the idea for The Immigrant was initially a musical one, he wrote: ‘Even in those early comedies I strove for a mood; usually music created it. An old song called Mrs Grundy created the mood for The Immigrant. The tune had a wistful tenderness that suggested two lonely derelicts getting married on a doleful, rainy day.’ Inspired by this tune, Chaplin worked on the café scene of the second half of The Immigrant. One of the luxuries of his situation was that he could keep filming over and over again, improvising until he was happy – this scene took 384 takes (his sidekick Edna Purviance reportedly became sick from eating so many beans). It was only when that was finished, and he was looking for ideas for a second reel that he invented the backstory on the boat. By the time that was filmed, he had 40,000 feet of film to reduce to 1,800, a task that took four days and nights. ‘The film went on to become one of Chaplin’s most popular films, and his only short film selected by the Library of Congress in 1998 for preservation in the US National Film Registry‘ The film went on to become one of Chaplin’s most popular films, and his only short film selected by the Library of Congress in 1998 for preservation in the US National Film Registry as being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’ – alongside several of his later features. In 1917, when The Immigrant came out, films were silent, and accompanied by a pianist, organ or an orchestra, depending on the size of the venue. They either improvised or worked off cue sheets provided by the film company – Chaplin supervised these for his early films. Everything changed in 1927 with the release of Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer. New technology meant that you could hear the actors speak and music became integral to the film. Handsome actors with squeaky voices were suddenly out of work (as parodied in Singin’ in the Rain) and the many musicians who had worked in cinemas lost their work. Chaplin resisted. He knew that the Tramp’s power, which made him beloved from Argentina to Zimbabwe, depended on him never speaking. In 1928 he started work on City Lights as a silent film, but featuring his own sound track for the first time (though heavily aided by Arthur Johnson). He compromised further with Modern Times, which started filming in 1934 and featured sound effects and Chaplin singing a nonsense song at the end. Chaplin never learnt to read music, but in his scores for City Lights and Modern Times, he demonstrates an innate musical sense of pace, rhythm and structure, and an understanding of how drama and music relate to each other. He wrote: ‘I tried to compose elegant and romantic music to frame my comedies in contrast to the tramp character, for elegant music gave my comedies an emotional dimension. Musical arrangers rarely understood this. They wanted the music to be funny… I wanted the music to be a counterpoint of grace and charm.’ ‘While the encroachment of sound was problematic for Chaplin, it meant that Los Angeles became a magnet for composers and musicians from all over the world‘ While the encroachment of sound was problematic for Chaplin, it meant that Los Angeles became a magnet for composers and musicians from all over the world, some fleeing for their lives from the Nazis (Schoenberg, Korngold, Waxman, Rózsa, for example), or as political dissidents (Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov) – and some just to make a buck in the new market. The self-taught former cockney urchin with aspirations to high culture was like a kid in a sweetshop. Illustrious artists would often stop at his studio just off Sunset Boulevard or come to dinner, and Chaplin’s autobiography is full of wonderful anecdotes about these encounters. He describes dining with Rachmaninov at the house of the pianist Horowitz: ‘Rachmaninov was a strange-looking man, with something aesthetic and cloistral about him… Someone brought the topic round to religion and I confessed I was not a believer. Rachmaninov quickly interposed: “But how can you have art without religion?” I was stumped for a moment. “I don’t think we are talking about the same thing,” I said. “My concept of religion is a belief in a dogma – and art is a feeling more than a belief.” “So is religion,” he answered. After that I shut up.’ ‘Chaplin nearly produced a film with Stravinsky, inventing at dinner with the composer a passion play about the crucifixion, set in a night club‘ Chaplin nearly produced a film with Stravinsky, inventing at dinner with the composer a passion play about the crucifixion, set in a night club, surrounded by a baying mob and businessmen making money out of the entertainment. The only person upset by the scene is a drunk, who gets thrown out. ‘I told Stravinsky, “they throw him out because he is upsetting the show.” I explained that putting a passion play on the dance floor of a night-club was to show how cynical and conventional the world has become in professing Christianity. The maestro’s face became very grave. “But that’s sacrilegious!” he said.’ Stravinsky (who had written Le Sacre du printemps in 1913) subsequently changed his mind and wrote to Chaplin about doing the film, but by then Chaplin’s attention had moved on. There are no direct references in Chaplin’s writings to Prokofiev, but the composer mentions him in his own diaries, referring to a meeting in France in 1931: ‘Tomorrow we dine with Charlie Chaplin. I never met him in my life before. It will be interesting to see him.’ Chaplin’s own immigration story did not end happily ever after in the US. On 18 September 1952, aged 63, he and his family set sail to London for the world premiere of Limelight. The next day, the US Attorney General revoked his re-entry permit subject to an interview about his politics and moral behaviour. He had been under the eye of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since 1922 – his files stretching to 1900 pages. ‘Sequences such as kicking the officer in The Immigrant, the prescient anti-fascism of The Great Dictator and anti-capitalist sentiment of Modern Times may have opened him up to this paranoia’ Sequences such as kicking the officer in The Immigrant, the prescient anti-fascism of The Great Dictator and anti-capitalist sentiment of Modern Times may have opened him up to this paranoia, as well as the generally humanist and anarchic subtexts of his films – especially during the 40s and early 50s, when the US was in the grip of its ‘Red Scare’. He never took American citizenship and was politically active supporting Soviet-American groups during the Second World War, but ultimately, there is no proof that he was an active Communist. (Claims about his morality were on firmer ground, though – until he married Oona O’Neill in 1945, he was prolific with women and had a particular fixation on very young ones.) It later emerged that the Immigration and Naturalization Service would not have had enough evidence to exclude Chaplin on his way back, but by then he had decided not to attempt to return, and continued with his family around Europe. He eventually settled in Corsier-sur-Vevey in Switzerland, where he died in 1977, at the age of 88. In 1972, he was given an honorary Oscar and returned to the US for the first time to accept it – receiving a 12-minute standing ovation from the best-known faces of Hollywood. It was recognition and a resolution of sorts, but a bitter one. Chaplin films most often end with him picking up his cane, dusting off his hat and walking into the sunset on his own, with a resolute hop-skip (spoiler alert: The Immigrant is a rare exception). He may have been the most famous man on the planet, and one of the wealthiest, but maybe he ultimately remained The Immigrant. There are versions of the film online, but I've decided not to post them because, frankly, they're terrible quality and the music is horrible. If you want to watch it, try to find a live performance or buy the collection of his films made between 1916 and 1917. It includes many classic shorts and will dispel any ideas you have about him being cheesy and sentimental – they include some of his funniest gags, and there's also a score by Carl Davis.

In this article, originally commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music, violinist and pedagogue György Pauk explains some of the most important violin playing principles, which came to him through the great Hungarian tradition I was 13 years old when I was accepted into the Liszt Academy. I was little and wore short trousers. This was unheard of, because all the students were 18 and over, but I was one of the exceptions. Ede Zathureczky listened to me and heard I was talented, and invited me into his class. I named my teaching position at the Royal Academy of Music after Zathureczky, because he was a great violinist and a great teacher. He was the continuation of the once-famous Hungarian violin school, which started with Joseph Joachim and continued with Jenő Hubay, who was the director of the Liszt Academy. Zathuretsky was a pupil of Hubay and became his successor there when he died, continuing the tradition. There have been so many great Hungarian violinists – Zoltán Székely, Franz von Vecsey, Tibor Varga, Joseph Szigeti, André Gertler, Loránd Fenyves and Sándor Végh all came from the same school, and many of them studied with Hubay. The Hungarian violin school is distinguished by the quality, beauty and purity of the sound. The way to find this sound is to find the balance between the two hands, and to be absolutely free in the body, without any pressure – like the human voice. The most important thing to produce a big sound is to use the weight of the right arm, which must be matched by the speed of vibrato. Some schools talk about pressure with the right arm, but I don’t agree with that. If you press, you choke the sound, and it becomes ugly and forced. One can only create volume with the weight of the right arm. Violin playing is difficult, but it should look easy to the audience – then you know you’re using your hands and fingers in the right way. The difficulty is that we constantly have to work against gravity. We have to win – with ease. The most common difficulty I find in new students is bow control. The bow should be the continuation of the arm. Many players are afraid that if they’re not pressing with the fingers they’ll drop the bow, but that’s all in the mind. It’s a big problem for some players because as soon as they put pressure on the bow the wrist becomes stiff, which means they are unable to control the bow speed. The best way to hold the bow is with a rounded hand, as if you’re playing the piano. The thumb should always be a little bit bent. As soon as it becomes straight you get stiffness in the rest of the hand. The violin should be positioned on the shoulder naturally, without you having to hold it or apply pressure with the chin. There should be a right angle between the violin and bow, like the letter L. That’s how you get the best sound, with the bow parallel to the bridge. At other angles the bow moves around and the sound becomes unclear. The right hand has to be matched by a strong left hand and a good vibrato. Students should do scales and exercises for at least an hour a day. We have to teach the fingers of the left hand to have power, taking advantage of gravity as the fingers drop. Never press, otherwise you will have pain, but you have to make the fingers strong, especially the tips. For this one needs to play scales, dropping the fingers from high up. There are wonderful Dounis exercises for strengthening the fingers. The other thing that makes violin playing difficult is shifting, but that’s purely mechanical and can be learnt by practising exercises. After a while you don’t have to think about it – the shift will be right because you’ve practised it properly and you can forget about it. It’s very important to make clear shifts. In the old days they used to slide a lot between notes, but there’s a different style today, and shifts are much clearer. I prefer not to spend a lesson hearing scales – I’d rather focus on the music – but sometimes I need to. It’s a good way to work on bow speed and intonation. With intonation, the ear tends to get lazy after a while. You play but you don’t hear whether something is properly in tune. I suggest playing 4ths for five minutes – that’s the best way to clean your ears. I also recommend 3rds and 6ths. Play each note very slowly until you are satisfied it’s in tune, making tiny adjustments in the fingers. I often ask students to sing. How you sing a melody is usually the most natural way of phrasing it, so then I get them to try to imitate it on their violin. If you want to express a special phrase, you need two things: dynamics and timing. Timing comes from breathing, which is why the best way to understand a phrase is to sing it. Humans always have to breathe and music always has to breathe. Some of my students call me Mr Sustain, because I often talk about sustaining the sound. When you play a long note on a clarinet or piano you get a consistent sound, but with the violin the sound goes away, because the bow gets thinner at the tip, so one has to compensate. One has to sustain the note – to give a little more weight to the arm as the bow gets thinner. I was a soloist, and I’m trying to teach my students how a soloist should play. They may not necessarily all become soloists, but they should know how to sustain the sound – that can be the difference between the way a soloist and a chamber musician plays. Not everyone becomes a soloist, but it’s easier for a soloist to switch to chamber music than the other way round. We work on technique and music at the same time, but if there are technical problems we talk about them immediately. It’s important that students know the notes when they come to a lesson so that we can approach everything from a musical point of view. Before you learn a piece you have to know the form and structure, so you know what you want to do. I can help and explain, but students should always study the complete score first, including the orchestra or piano parts, because music is all about give and take. I’m careful not to push students to take my views of a piece. I like to hear what a student thinks about the piece before I say anything. Then I try to show them the style, without saying it’s the only way – that’s not good. A talented person has the imagination to create their own version. I want students to keep their musical personality. The most important thing is that a student is talented, and you can notice talent at first hearing. You can’t live without chamber music. It teaches you to be a better musician, to listen to other people. I was very lucky that apart from my solo career I had a piano trio for many years, with Ralph Kirshbaum and Peter Frankl, which was made up of three soloists. Quartet playing is a totally different style from piano trios, though – the difference being the quality and the volume of sound. Throughout my performing life, I practised five or six hours every day. I recommend that students should practise for three hours, have a rest, and then do a couple more hours in the afternoon. It’s a difficult profession, and if you are serious and want to succeed, you have to put in this kind of work. The competition is incredible these days – perfect intonation and technique are essential, and artistry comes on top of that. Change can happen pretty fast – after a few months all these things come naturally. Some of my students are quick to understand. They pick things up from only half a sentence, especially once they’ve been with me for half a year. I plan students’ repertoire carefully, to balance it and take it slowly. I will sometimes start them with an easier Mozart violin concerto, because musically it doesn’t present so many problems, but it’s still Mozart. Or I use the Bruch First Violin Concerto, which is not as demanding musically as the Tchaikovsky or Mendelssohn, but is technically quite difficult. Students will be with me for three or four years, so in the first year I’m very careful that they shouldn’t stretch themselves with pieces that are beyond their capacity. Bruch, Lalo and Saint-Saëns are much less demanding than Beethoven, Brahms and Sibelius. The Sibelius is one of the most difficult concertos and very often I hear players perform it who have no sound. Teachers shouldn’t allow students to play Sibelius if they don’t have the basic projected, warm, big, colourful sound. I like contemporary music – I played many new concertos throughout my career. I’m careful – especially with first- and second-year students – that they do basic repertoire first, though. In a way, playing contemporary music is easier than Mozart, Schubert or Beethoven. The Beethoven is perhaps the most difficult of all the concertos. You’re on stage and you feel naked, and everyone knows the piece. All my students have to perform Bartók. I was very lucky that my professor Zathureczky had played with Bartók, so through him I knew I was hearing how Bartók wanted to hear his pieces. When I was around 17, Zathureczky asked me to play the Solo Sonata, which is one of his most difficult pieces. I’m happy that it’s played all over the world these days – much more than it used to be. I realised the genius of Bartók from an early age, and was called a Bartók specialist, but I don’t like the word ‘specialist’. Whether it’s Bach or Bartók, it should be approached from the musical point of view and not for being ‘modern’ or ‘classical’ music. There is only good music or bad music. When you play Bartók, it’s helpful if you’re Hungarian, but you don’t have to be. His music is all based on folk music, and it helps if you grow up in a country where they sing those songs. You have to understand that Hungarian language and folk music is all accented on the first syllable, and that principle is valid for Bartók’s music. You have to be accurate in your rhythms, and about where his accents are. His marking is very clear – how he wanted you to phrase; when you should breathe; how the metre changes. When I go to concerts I hear brilliant Prokofiev, and wonderful Rachmaninoff, Walton and Stravinsky, but I’m more interested how performers play Schubert, or a Mozart quartet or Haydn trio. That’s when you can hear the quality of a musician. The key to playing Mozart lies in his operas. One should play his violin concertos as if inhabiting different operatic characters. Again, it helps when I ask students to sing these. Vocalise the different characters, and that’s how you should play it. I encourage students go to the opera. Schubert may be even more difficult than Mozart. It’s in the tiniest details – how to play the accents, for example. They are not real accents – it’s all about timing them. With Schubert, you have to imagine being in Vienna, and to know what a waltz is: in Strauss waltzes, Viennese style, you emphasise the first beat, and then wait a little for the third beat. Schubert’s music is full of sadness. It is often marked Allegro Moderato – ‘yes, but…’ It always drags and hesitates and is mostly sad, because he had a terribly tragic life. In this country, promising violinists aren’t always able to find the necessary time to devote to their playing between the ages of 14 and 18. These are the most important years, when one should learn to play instrument properly, but children are terribly busy with their studies at that age, and there’s not enough emphasis on music. By 18, they are often technically behind and it’s very difficult to catch up. I won three competitions and have been on juries all over the world, but I’m not a great lover of competitions. They are good for motivating students to prepare repertoire, but how can they ever be fair? Everyone has different tastes, and there is always politics. Some of my students have been successful in competitions, but I don’t press them to go. The most important thing for me is the music. This interview was first published on the Royal Academy of Music website in 2016 If you need help creating in-depth articles and interviews for your organisation, please get in touch.

In this article, originally commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music, violinist and professor Giovanni Guzzo describes his teaching priorities, and explains why it’s important for students to believe that everything is possible Meeting Maurice Hasson and coming to the Royal Academy were the best things that could have happened to me at such a key stage in my career. I did my BMus and postgrad here and it was a life-changing experience. Being in London was a bit daunting at first, because it felt like such an immense and fast-paced city, but I managed to get the best out of it, taking advantage of being surrounded by so much culture. At the age of 82, Maurice Hasson still practises five hours a day and continues to discovers new things. That is an amazing career to have. He was a pupil of Szeryng and taught me a lot of that old tradition, but the greatest thing he gave me was a very clear structure to my playing. Once I had that structure, I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted. That was very important to me – it was like building a house that I could furnish and decorate myself. One of the most rigorous things about Maurice Hasson’s philosophy is the importance of the score. It is the direct connection we have to what the composer wanted to say. Starting from there, the possibilities are endless, but always within that structure. There’s no way you can play the solo violin part in a concerto without knowing what’s going on in the orchestra and how that affects what and how you should be playing. I recently performed the Sibelius Concerto, and that is one big symphony. I ask students, ‘Who is playing here?’, ‘What is this leading to?’, and ‘What is the phrase?’, so they understand the search for knowledge behind it all. One of the key elements of my teaching is never to take away the personality of the student. We all have different things to say and I believe my work is to give the tools to students so they can translate that in the best possible way. The violin is not an easy instrument to play, but having these tools allows them to develop their own voice. Students arrive here at such an important moment in their lives. The years between 18 and 28 are a key time, when they want to play and explore and absorb as much music as possible. So many things are coming together for them. They have a lot of the musical ideas but they are ready to develop through their environment. It happened to me when I was here – the Academy became a haven where I could explore musical ideas and different styles of playing, breathing and living music every day and being inspired and surrounded by so many different artists and personalities. At that age everything is possible – or at least one should believe that everything is possible, and that mentality helps you achieve things that later you realise were very difficult. Sometimes I come back to a piece I played with orchestra as a young man and I wonder how I managed it back then. While they’re at the Academy, students go from being young people to being adults – not only in their personal lives, but also in how they play and approach their instruments and the musical elements of pieces. It’s fantastic to see that process. Sometimes it happens very quickly and sometimes it happens more slowly. They are laying down the foundation stones of who they will be, taking decisions that will shape their future in one way or another. I would never say, ‘Let’s stop everything and just use scales and etudes,’ because that can be frustrating and demoralising. At the end of the day everyone wants to play – that’s what we enjoy. It’s essential to find the right piece for the right person at the right time. I believe most technical aspects you need to overcome can be solved through music. Understanding why the composer uses a technical element to express a musical idea is key. I was always playing pieces that I wanted to play and overcoming the obstacles, so I always try to solve technical difficulties through musical ideas. Everyone is different, and that fascinates me. There are people who come here with fantastic musical ability and phrasing, and like a nice car that has everything, they come to the point where they want to have all the tools to get the best and most effective balance out of the engine – you put oil in and all the pieces start to work. And there are people who come with a fantastic technique and you just have to help them spread their wings and free their imagination. Teaching others is the greatest way of teaching yourself. You have to come to every lesson with a different mind for each student. It’s rewarding for me as an artist, because not only do I give to them, but they also give me a lot to think about my own playing. The most important thing is the willingness to want more. It’s so easy to listen to good music these days – you can watch the greatest orchestras, conductors and players on YouTube. There is a lot of information for students to absorb, but ultimately, creativity comes from the desire to become a better artist, to have more to say with what you do. That’s what we’re all trying to achieve. Why do people come to concerts? They want to feel something. I use images a lot in my teaching. What are you imagining? What do you smell? What do you want people to feel? As musicians we want to transport a feeling, to move people. They’ve taken themselves out of their houses, got into their cars and driven to the concert hall. They want to enjoy themselves. In the scheme of things, one mistake in half an hour doesn’t matter, but they can’t be moved if you are not trying to say something. We learn to play the instrument with enough ease that we don’t have to think about how we do what we do. It should be like the human voice. The main goal is to forget about all the technical challenges and just to communicate. You only have to listen to Spotify to realise that we are living in a golden age of violin playing, but there is a special charm older generations had. They took more risks, because recording techniques meant that everything had to be done in big takes. When you listen to those players, you hear that they were doing interesting things. I encourage students to listen to as many violinists as possible – both from today and historic ones – and to think about the elements that attract them from their playing. It’s fascinating, because we can find a lot of information to bring to our own playing. We are living in exciting times, because I think we’re going back to the excitement of the live performance. There are more CD companies focused on live recordings. The CD has been an amazing tool, and we have got close to perfection, but it’s exciting to see this tendency going back to risk-taking. We all have to aim a lot higher than just playing the right notes at the right time – we’re getting away from what a computer could do. It’s important to find the joy in everything that relates to music. Everything feeds into everything else. The profession has changed so much in 20 years, and these days we expect soloists to be able to play concertos, but we also want to listen to them playing chamber music. I also lead orchestras. Chamber music feeds into solo playing and also into orchestral playing. It all feeds into the same pot. You have to be a complete artist, to have a huge thirst for everything, and for understanding all those different sides of your career. Most artists are like that now, and audiences want that. Music is not just about the world we create within the walls of the Academy – when you step on to the streets of London there are so many amazing things on offer: free museums, concerts, theatre. I encourage students to grab it all. As teachers we try to give students the tools they need. We teach them how to play as soloists, through the solo repertoire, but at the end of the day, they will also need all those tools as orchestral players or in chamber music. It’s important to be open to life fulfilling its promise in different ways. Some people come here with the mentality of wanting to be a soloist and are disappointed to find themselves playing in orchestra. Playing in an orchestra can be an exciting life – it has been for me. There’s so much more to the concertmaster role than playing. You have to be able to manage a section, to know how to ask for things, and to be able to get the best out of people. The English word for it, ‘leader’, is perfect, because it illustrates how you are part of a group, but you are also helping to achieve something greater. You are the bridge between the conductor and the orchestra, and you help transform the ideas that conductors have. It’s a fascinating conversation and has made me into a different artist. Leading an orchestra involves psychology, in the same way that football coaches get the best out of their players. In a good orchestra everyone knows how to play their instrument, so you’re creating an environment where they can bring out the best of themselves and feel part of the bigger process, and that they’re essential. It’s easy for the back desk of first violins to feel lonely, so my position as leader is to make them feel as important as the first desk. Every group brings different challenges, so I’ve discovered a lot about human interaction. Ultimately, we are all sharing fantastic music, playing together in beautiful moments that will never happen again. It’s magical when it happens well. The most important thing is to bring people together to find a collective feeling of being part of something great. The big challenge for students is time management, because there are so many opportunities to learn and get involved, but they still have to practise. Time is so precious, and this is the most valuable time for students. They have to learn so many things so quickly and it’s fantastic to be able to use this time to improve, and to keep growing before they go out into the big wide world. I realise now how great a luxury it is to have so much time to practise. The financial crisis changed our profession and the way artists and ensembles work, but in a way, it opened up a whole new vision of what is possible with less and what the priorities are. I find that exciting. Artistically, there are many opportunities. It’s exciting to see how creative people are now. Many new projects have come to life – new orchestras and people doing things differently. This search for innovation and creativity is constant, which is important. People come to the Academy with fantastic ideas and they find the help here to shape them into something that is beautiful, and that it’s possible to take out to the wider world. It’s exciting, and can only happen because we’re surrounded by fantastic people here. This interview was first published on the Royal Academy of Music website in 2016 If you need help creating in-depth articles and interviews for your organisation, please get in touch.