Dear Music School Students, Supporters, Parents and Tutors!
News of this year’s End of Term Concert… our ‘Winter Spectacular Concert’ this year held in the beautiful setting of Huntingdon Town Hall Assembly Rooms on the last Saturday of term, Saturday 8th December, 7.30pm. Please come along and bring your friends and family - it is sure to be a great event, and it’s free!
Welcome to the Huntingdonshire Music School and Huntingdonshire Music School Association (HUMSA) - one of the Internet’s best kept secrets!
Whilst we may not brag very much, the school is very much a place of musical excellence where adults and children can learn an instrument and play with others in a relaxed and friendly setting.
We have an ‘open door’ policy so why not come in to see us on a Saturday morning and see what a few hundred people get up to in the name of music. We can’t promise that it will make you more attractive to the opposite sex or provide superhuman powers. We can, however, promise you fun and the ability to take up something that might very well change your life.
Sit back, relax and explore…
A snippet of the calendar
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We also have a new feature - a spot for staff to strut their stuff. Taking the first spotlight is Robin Norman who teaches brass and directs the Senior Concert Band and the Senior Orchestra. Not being a wallflower - they don’t tend to suit tubas - Robin is playing ‘Fnug’ which demonstrates some of the many sounds a tuba is capable of including harmonics and beat-boxing. There is more information on this piece on YouTube.
All members of the public are welcome
Junior and Senior strings groups
Folk set
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Pieces range from Purcell (Nymphs and Shepherds and The Lovely Celia), Gluck (O del mio dolce Amor), Caccini(Amarilli) and Durante(Vergin, tutto Amor) to Mozart(La ci darem la mano), Schubert(Ave Maria), Tosti(Preghiera), Faure(Automne), Beethoven(Mit einem gemaltem Band) and Vaughan Williams(Silent Noon).
Moving forward to Gerschwin (Nice work if you can get it), Hoagy Carmichael(Georgia on my mind), Kurt Weill(Stay Well), Erroll Garner(Misty),Lloyd Webber(Wishing you were somehow here again), Herbert Hughes(Salley Gardens), Into the West from the Lord of the Rings,Carrickfergus from a Celtic Woman Songbook and two new pieces, Benedictus by the Welsh composer Robat Arwyn and a piece sung by the multi talented pianist(A touch of heaven) written by his uncle, Frank Ella!
Tickets are £5, (children admitted free) are available on the door and include refreshments during the interval
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A concert of songs and guitar pieces performed by
HuMS Singers and
HuMS Classical Guitar Ensemble
Performed at All Saints’ Church Huntingdon
19:30 on Sat 12 November 2011
Tickets £5 at the door
HuMS groups are students from Huntingdonshire Music School, www.humsa.org.uk, 01480 379220
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This coming Saturday the 7th May there will be a joint concert from the singers at the Huntingdonshire Music School and the Cambridge Guitar Orchestra (www.cgo.org.uk) in Godmanchester.
The programme is a varied one with the CGO playing:
together with a joint piece with the HUMS singers.
The CGO has and continues to include players from the music school including current teachers Sandra Buckenham and Len Davidson and is always entertaining.
Tickets: £6, Students £3, children free
Starts 19:00
Location: St. Mary the Virgin, Godmanchester
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HUMSA has a euphonium which is available for loan to anyone who wishes to learn this instrument at the Huntingdonshire Music School. It is part of the brass family and smaller and therefore more practical than the tuba. It is a solo instrument (meaning it often features on its own) and is an important instrument in a brass band although it can be played in a wind band, military band and orchestra so there are a wide variety of styles of music available to the euphonium player. It produces a gorgeous warm sound.
Famous euphonium players include Nicholas Childs (Black Dyke) his son, David Childs (Cory) and Stephen Mead (Royal Northern College of Music).
At the moment we have just the one loan instrument available (courtesy of Sean Pagington and First Brass) but if needed we’ll try and obtain more loan instruments.
References
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The Sing with Swing Workshop 2011 is being led by professional singer, Bridget Hardy in Buckden on the afternoon of Saturday 19th March 2011, 2pm – 5pm and the morning of Sunday 20th March, 10am – 1pm. The workshop will include individual master classes and cover singing in the swing style and microphone technique.
At 2pm the HuMS Big Band will join the workshop providing live backing for all the singers. Please select three songs from the provided list at the time of booking.
Participants may be invited to join the HuMS Big Band in a fund raising concert on Friday 25th March, 7.30pm – a great opportunity to lead a song and show off to friends and family the skills learnt and developed at the Sing with Swing Workshop 2011. Tickets for this event will be on sale at the workshop, costing just £5.
For further details contact Julian, tel. 07791 723 852
There are only 20 workshop places in total so don’t hang around!
This workshop has been organised by HuMSA (Huntingdonshire Music School Association), a registered charity supporting musical education in the Huntingdonshire region through provision of bursaries to children and other activities
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Huntingdonshire is twinned with Marburg-Biedenkopf in the state of Hess, Germany, about 50 miles north of Frankfurt. It is a really attractive region with tree covered hills all around. Marburg Biedenkopf has a summer music festival and we have been invited to take part. The trip will be centred around the picturesque village of Bad Endbach. A new swimming pool and spa opened last October and the village also has shops, cafes etc.Links: Wikipedia - Marburg-Biedenkopf, Wikipedia - Bad Endbach, city of Marburg website, videos: YouTube - video 1
The trip is open to any student of the Huntingdonshire Music School - you don’t need to be playing in a band or ensemble.
Thursday 11th August:
Friday 12th August - Sunday 14th August
Monday 15th August:
We will be staying in the village of Bad Endbach. There isn’t a big enough hotel in Bad Endbach that will accommodate us all, so we will have to be split between 2 (possibly 3) hotels situated close together. The rooms are ensuite singles, twins or doubles, and some will have the capability of having an extra single bed put in the room. There may be an option to stay with local families.
Editor - Found this odd link connecting a visitor from Warboys to Bad Endbach
Adults c £220
Children c £200
We hope to have a donation from Huntingdonshire District Council that will help toward the cost of the trip; we will also hold fundraising events to raise funds for the trip. If there are 40 people on the trip and the fund raising goes well, the adult price could drop to £175.
Included in price:
Excluded:
A £25 deposit is needed to secure your place at the time of booking with the booking form (see entry in discussion forum) to either Alan Crosthwaite (a.crosthwaite495@btinternet.com) or Joyce Reeves.
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Having an impending ABRSM tuba Grade 4 exam looming I thought it might make sense to see what means of playing with accompaniment were available to me (short of kidnapping a piano player). I’d heard that somewhere there might be some download options available. Unfortunately for me, or rather anyone with a tuba, I didn’t find anything to help me. I did, however, find that the ABRSM does itself now have a ‘download shop’.
The ABRSM Audio Download Shop (http://www.abrsm.org/audioshop) provides the ability to download the piano part for Grades 1 - to 8 for the piano (!) [2009-2012], violin [2008 - 2011], clarinet [2008-2013] and flute [2008-2013]. Individual downloads are GBP 0.79 (79 pence) each or there’s an offer of 1 from each of the A, B and C lists (i.e. your complete exam) for GBP 1.95 available once per grade. Pretty cheap and a lot less hassle than trying to persuade the computer to create a backing track.
From the ABRSM site:
An expanding range
Launched in 2008 with recordings of ABRSM’s Piano syllabus (2009 & 2010), the download service has already proved highly popular with pianists. It now includes almost every piece from ABRSM syllabuses for Violin (2008–2011), Flute and Clarinet (both 2008–2013).
Amongst the huge range of repertoire, violinists will find Howard Blake’s jovial Dance of the Snowmen (from the famous animated film) at Grade 5, and can make new discoveries, such as the charming Sentimental Romance by Wilhelm Stenhammar (sometimes known as ‘the Swedish Elgar’) at Grade 8.
Individual movements from Koechlin’s 14 pieces were reintroduced to the Flute syllabus in 2008, and flautists at Grades 1, 2, 4 and 5 can enjoy these beautiful pieces. Grade 3 clarinettists can discover the highly effective transfer of Mendelssohn’s Song without Words. The Arabesque by Germaine Tailleferre (the only female member of the early 20th-century French group of composers, Les Six) is a wonderful find at Grade 7.
New features and offers
The preview facility allows all users to try out 10 seconds of any track before making the decision to purchase. Recordings of pieces set at Grades 1–5 are priced at 79 pence each, and those at Grades 6–8 are 99 pence each.
For the price of what is normally a single track, those purchasing Violin, Flute or Clarinet exam repertoire will actually receive two tracks: the exemplar recording of solo instrument with piano accompaniment, and a bonus track that includes just the piano accompaniment alone, for playalong practice.
This doesn’t help anyone on any other instrument, including the tuba. Are there any other sites out there than can provide accompaniment downloads for ABRSM (or Guildhall) exams?
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The interview of the HUMS Classical Guitar Ensemble with BBC Radio Cambrigheshire’s Sue Dougan is can now be listened to on BBC iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p008zh1y/Sue_Dougan_in_the_Afternoon_29_07_2010/. It will be available for 7 days (usual restriction) which means something like the 2nd August. I wouldn’t leave it that late mind!
The interview starts at around 1h 15mins into the programme.
Enjoy.
PS The Interview features music from the recent CD, ‘El Huertos de los Olivos’ (The Olive Grove). A sample of the tracks from the CD can be heard on the Music Alley site (used to be the Podcast Music Network).
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The interview lasted for something like 30 minutes and ranged far and wide not only about the guitar ensemble but also the music school itself. We always hit the problem of ‘school’ being associated with youngsters so often folks don’t realise that the music school is open to all ages. This has surfaced before when talking with the BBC but apparently Sue hadn’t even heard of the school. Well she has heard now and there’s a tentative suggestion that an future feature might be made on the music school itself, perhaps in September.
For those who’d like to listen to the interview it will be broadcast at around 3pm on Thursday 29th July on BBC Radio Cambridgshire. The schedule for Thursday is available here. You can always listen live from the BBC Radio Cambs website. It will be available via the BBC iPlayer for up to 7 days after the interview.
The photos have been added to the Huntingdonshire Music School group on Flickr.
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Huntingdonshire Music School Association work to raise funding for bursaries for Music School students. We are fortunate in having a number of benefactors, including the Huntingdon Freemen’s Charity.
Each year we encourage students, and parents/guardians of students under 18, to apply for a bursary. This is usually the cost of one term’s tuition. However, we cannot guarantee that funds will always be available. Each application is treated in the strictest confidence and the details are only know to the Chairman and the Treasurer of the association, and the Director of the Music School. Application forms are available from the office and we advise students of the details for each year, via the internal music school Leger Lines newsletter.
Please note that some of these benefactors apply restrictions on access to a bursary, for example based on age or home address e.g. for Freemen’s bursaries. For students who do not fall within the access requirements we are also consider the availability of Association funds to provide bursaries.