How did you come to be involved in conducting?
I was a tuba player in my first life and studied at the RNCM. I just gradually started doing a little conducting, as many people do, which eventually took over and became the main thing.
What do you enjoy about conducting?
Being involved 100% of the time – as a tuba player in an orchestral context that wasn't always the case! The fact that you're constantly involved, constantly making decisions and having to bring together many disparate ideas and opinions to find a way of making a group better than the sum of its parts.
How did the ConductIT project come about?
It all comes out of Erasmus, which I think most people associate with student exchanges – with someone taking six months to a year of their degree in a different country, studying within a different institution. We obviously have that at the RNCM, along with staff exchanges. The idea with those is that you team up with someone in a different country doing a similar job and go there for a week, with them coming to your place of work at a different time, to exchange ideas and learn from each other. An Erasmus Strategic Partnership, which is what this project is, can then develop out of these exchanges. The idea is that by building these relationships, it is possible to develop a project which none of the partners would be able to do on their own. That's how this came about between Morten Wensberg at the University of Stavanger and myself.
How does the Erasmus funding work?
You think up a project and apply. There's a stipulation that you need to have partnerships with three organisations, each from a different country within the Erasmus programme. The way this all came together was that we had done a massive open online course (MOOC) with the Open University as part of one of their introduction to music courses, so we were already involved with online music learning. Naomi Barker from the OU then met Morten at a conference and they ended up talking about the course and the RNCM, and the relationships evolved out of that.
What do you hope participants will get out of the course?
It aims to provide a resource that anyone can access anywhere, at any time. It strikes me that conducting is something where there are a small number of us who do it as a full-time job but an awful lot who do it as part of a wider job in schools or youth bands or a local choir. Because it's such a small part of their workload, they don't really train – they just do it. We've all sat and watched conductors, good and bad, and can start with a rough idea of what we need to do. The idea for ConductIT is to research and develop something that gives people a basic technical grounding, to make them more effective when they're standing in front of their school orchestra or work choir or whatever they might be leading. This might be enough for some people but it might also become a precursor for doing a more advanced course to take those skills further.
Is there a particular point in a musician's career when they should be introduced to conducting?
I don't think so. Two years ago, the RNCM started giving four, one-hour conducting classes to every single first-year undergraduate – so every instrumentalist, composer and vocalist now gets a very brief introduction to conducting. Equally, I've taught courses, summer schools and the like with musicians and teachers who are 20 years into their careers and who find themselves moved or promoted into a role where they suddenly have to conduct a high-level group – they have the leadership skills, the inspirational ability, the knowledge of working with young people but nobody ever actually taught them the basics of waving their arms around. So it really can be something that people can come into at any stage.
The three-year project runs from 1 September 2018. More details, along with further information about the RNCM's conducting courses, can be found at rncm.ac.uk/conducting
