My Experience

Composing music is a strange compulsion. I didn’t give it a thought until I was asked to write the incidental music to a school production of “Twelfth Night”. I was asked because I was one of only two pupils doing Music A-level at that time. It seemed to go down well. That was it! I caught the ‘bug’.

While Double Bass and Composition were my major studies at Sheffield University, I didn’t see them as featuring in my future professional life at the time. I came from a family of teachers, and thought that was my destiny, training in Primary education at Manchester University. However, while I was there, I was also an assistant House Mistress at Chetham’s Music School and organist at my local church. At the same time, the Sheffield Bach Society under Roger Bullivant, asked to perform a cantata for choir and orchestra that I had submitted for my degree, which rather focused my thinking into music-making rather than just teaching. While I did start working life as a peripatetic teacher of cello and bass in North Staffordshire, the composing bug continued.

Moving to Leicestershire, marriage and 2 children later, I was needing some guidance, composing in a vacuum. I was encouraged to join the post graduate course at Nottingham University by the wonderful Nigel Osborne which led on to the Doctorate with Jim Fulkerson) and subsequently teaching at various institutions and privately. Education remains an important part of my thinking, but more recently, I have retired from teaching to focus on composing now the family is independent. As a string player and with a cellist husband, much of my composition is string based but includes choral, brass, keyboard and mixed ensemble works, and arrangements for small ensembles and choirs.