Every now and again it just so happens that when you stop chasing a dream it comes chasing after you.
I love to educate. I get a kick out of sharing a passion. And if my love of music opens up a new dimension for someone, there is nothing more rewarding. It’s what kept me driven in over a decade of teaching music history at the Royal Academy of Music. So many of the students there don’t relish the academic side of their degree but when one of them starts joining the dots between the history of music performance and how they play now – it’s magic. The thing is you have to lecture a whole theatre of students for a few to be really inspired. I suppose an extension of this was my hankering after opportunities to make radio programmes – something I’ve been chasing for years.
I’ve been lucky to be a guest on numerous BBC shows, as the so-called expert, and my proviso on agreeing to move to Canada was that I could keep this going – whether on regular trips back, or down-the-line. Just after the last moving box was packed, at a point when I felt I was resigning work left, right, and centre, an email landed asking if I fancied making some programmes in New York. I’d been trying so hard to cling onto the things I thought I knew about that I hadn’t dreamt that the BBC would be interested in goings-on across the pond – or in taking a risk on me presenting.
Fast-forward a couple of months and I’m in New York with producer Les Pratt on the trail of the Early Music scene. Zig-zagging across Manhattan to visit the city’s top period performers there was little time to dwell on this being my first time on the interviewing side of the mic.
In advance of the trip I’d asked a few people for their tips on interviewing. ‘Just be yourself’ and ‘enjoy yourself’ were the recurring answers and they seemed such clichés but, in reality, along with ‘keep listening’, they were the best bits of advice. In a funny way, it was a really self-affirming experience. I’ve always been swept away by New York, and I was genuinely absorbed in the world of its Early Music. I’m a baroque flautist so I speak the language of historical performance therefore that felt like the easy bit, but I never imagined the process would feel so wonderfully creative – and I got a real kick out working with Les to choose the music and then shape, and reshape the story. It was like being let loose on a new approach to education in which there are no syllabus restrictions and the only rule is to keep it vibrant and on-message. And then of course came the real trick – of which Les is a master – getting the best chat out of the artists. There is clearly no substitute for time and experience on this and I’ve got lots to learn, but in New York I lucked-out with some fabulously interesting-and-interested musicians who made my job a dream.
As for the rest, well, besides navigating the subway (once…), we didn’t run out of batteries through extra takes, and there was something pretty exhilarating about writing new links in the back of a yellow cab.
You can hear where the trail led us and who we met on two episodes of the Early Music Show from New York City.
Where does the uttered music go? 