Amateur music making is alive and well in the UK. “Making Music,” the UK’s number one organisation for leisure-time music, has a membership alone of over 3,500 groups representing around 190,000 music makers. In playing music together, planning repertoire, and organising concerts, amateur music making can offer an important route towards individual wellbeing as well as stronger community. Its effects are, however, much wider still: amateur groups offer a bridge to professional practice, allow new music to come to light, offer contributions to local economies, and open a window onto the best of grass-roots innovation and collaborative practice.

In 2016, I was a founding member of “Music at Number 11” – a consortium of four groups exploring less familiar repertoire and instrumental combinations from the late medieval period, through the renaissance, the baroque, to the present day. Our eleven members play nearly twenty different instruments – from the renaissance crumhorn to classical guitar. We have commissioned a number of new works from Bristol-based composers, including Richard Leigh Harris (Composition Tutor at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire), Bennet Jones, Steve Walters, and Julian Dale. We have also organised workshops at the Silk Mill studio and gallery in Frome (Apr 2018), and at the Barbican library for Making Music’s exhibition celebrating leisure-time music in the UK (Mar 2019). We have helped support a number of musicians on their way to building a career in music (such as regular MN11 collaborator soprano Hayley Guest). I have a background in cello (modern and baroque), piano, and renaissance wind-capped instruments. I was a member of the Cambridge University Music Society’s first orchestra, and a long-standing cello-section-leader of the Oxford University Philharmonia, also performing regularly with the Oxford Millennium Orchestra and OU Graduate Philharmonia.