Archive | Housekeeping

Rosemary’s music lectures for the Manchester Continuing Education Network (www.mancent.org.uk) have moved online, so anyone can now join in via Zoom. Her Autumn series will consist of four two-hour sessions on Friday mornings in September and October, exploring The piano concertos of Mozart and Beethoven Mozart’s piano concertos span his life, from childhood experiments before […]

The celebrations begin! Beethoven’s 250th anniversary will be celebrated in many ways in 2020, but it is possible to survey his whole life – and to experience some of his most personal musical thoughts – by a study of his piano sonatas. Rosemary will lead two Day Schools in Stockport to give an overview of […]

Rosemary has recently been accepted as a Music Lecturer by MANCENT – the Manchester Continuing Education Network. (http://mancent.org.uk). From the Spring of 2020 she will be offering one-day study courses on musical topics, based in South Manchester. More details will be available in the Autumn, but the first term will feature two one-day courses on […]

Rosemary’s talks are always designed specifically for their audiences, and two examples are in her 2019-20 schedule. Hearing Handel is a workshop discussion session with a group where Rosemary is a regular speaker, and with whom she has conducted many experiments in listening. This time she will be using music from Handel’s oratorios (Messiah and […]

After a number of requests, Rosemary has produced a book containing nineteen of her songs which have arisen out of groups meeting for periods of quiet reflection. They are simple settings for unison voices and piano, designed to help the singers remember the words and take them to heart. The title, Sing into Silence, was suggested […]

The winter months have seen a number of new developments in Rosemary’s work. two new talks have been added to her substantial portfolio of topics. The English Musical Renaissance showed how composers of the early 20th century found inspiration in their 16th and 17th century predecessors. There are very close correspondences to be found, not […]

Over the past months the project to set seven verses of the Bhagavad Gita to music has progressed to the completion of the first three movements – each complete in itself, but intended to form part of a six-movement sequence. Another short song was also commissioned in October: Nothing but the Knower is intended as […]

The winter is a good time to get down to some desk work and composition. New musical works had to be put to one side for a while to make room for travels as an examiner and the preparation of a fresh talk for the Concordia String Orchestra’s Christmas lunch. Variations on an orchestral theme […]

In November Rosemary will be leading a composition workshop for A Level musicians in a South Manchester school. The session is called Characters and Adventures and is designed to help the students to create interesting thematic material and to exploit it to the full. There should also be some ‘fun and games’ in exercises and […]

Rosemary is currently preparing a lecture entitled Unfinished Business for the new META group (Marple Exploring The Arts) on Thursday October 22nd. A number of great musical masterpieces were left unfinished by their composers, and Rosemary will explore what went wrong, what survives, and the interesting challenges these works have set for later musicians. The […]