This year in Birmingham has been a very productive year. As well as things going well at college and my violin playing coming on well, I have begun to make lots of useful contacts and extend my playing outside of college. I have always had a footing in the ‘band’ world of playing and I have previously found this quite a separate thing from my classical music world, however this year I have begun to merge these two aspects into my musical career.

In college, it has been a brilliant year, with the main highlight being performing Mahler 6 in the Town Hall with the Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra. Also, within college, the quartet that I formed at the end of last year has been going really well. As well as performing in college to our peers we have been working on building up our repertoire for functions and have begun playing weddings and other such events. We also were given the opportunity to travel to France during the Easter to do a series of concerts in and around Blois including one at Blois Cathedral. For this we played a varied program of pieces including Beethoven, Shostakovich and Arvo Part.

In my academic studies this year, I did a module on the ‘Belle Epoque’, which I found very interesting and really helped me with my insight into music from that period and the context behind it.

I also began to look into the music industry and the ever-evolving role of the musician within it. I wrote an essay on the relationship between an artist and their audience, how the Internet has changed this relationship for the better and how by learning to utilise the internet we, as musicians can benefit from it.

As well as within college, I have also started to look further to where my career may take me. I am now playing for a band called ‘Hope and Social’ from Leeds, and as well as playing Bass Guitar for them, I write all the string arrangements on their albums. This has developed contacts for me among other bands and I have begun to work writing string arrangements for bands in both Birmingham and Yorkshire. This work with bands and other alternative artists meant that I was able to develop a reputation for being versatile and willing to work in all situations and at the start of summer I was asked to lead a quartet for a recording in London. The recording turned out to be at Angel studios and the client that I was recording for was the Italian beer company, Peroni.

I have also begun to write music of my own with some peers from college and we have formed a group called Lantern Music. In this group we work to merge our influences from all aspects of music we are involved in. This means writing music that incorporates our classical playing just as much as our rock and pop based backgrounds. We have recently travelled to Berlin to collaborate with an artist from New York called Cassis and are working on some music we hope to tour and perform in various venues around Europe next year.

Thank you so much for your ongoing support. Without it I know that I wouldn’t be in a position where I was able to do many of the things I have done.