I am a musician, and more than in most professions, it is essential that musicians have a hobby. Fishing is mine. My ‘chosen’ profession was thrust on me really, rather than chosen, as I wasn’t much good at anything else….
Continue reading →Dear Friends, at long last, I am delighted to announce the publication of my Studies and Technical Exercises for the horn. The Creative Horn Player is over sixty pages and contains a collection of 44 technical exercises and melodic studies….
Continue reading →‘Follow your instincts’ we are often told when looking to the immediate future and seeking reassurance. It is often good advice. Life is for living, and it is easy to be tempted to ‘go for it’ when it comes to…
Continue reading →This June 9 will mark the 111th anniversary of the meeting, in England in 1910, between former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. Roosevelt had travelled to England to attend the funeral of Edward VII….
Continue reading →In July 1969 I was still playing in the Hallé Orchestra, but had recently done a trial in two Proms with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and was due to leave the Hallé after seven years – at the end of…
Continue reading →In this enforced lockdown my thoughts have been recently turning to events, some happier than others, that have shaped my life. Events and people have come to mind and then wandered off, but two strands around which the rest have…
Continue reading →This is taken from a talk I gave at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama When are lectures and ‘talks’ useful? When students recognise something useful in them that they can learn. When they make students determine to…
Continue reading →No doubt the psychologists will, one day, describe in detail why one young person will take up what was once called the French Horn – no doubt because of this country’s proximity to Calais, which of course we used to…
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