Tonight saw the end of a great tour with Ensemble CONfusion, a group comprising of three modern music groups from Dortmund, Aachen and Detmold. The five concerts had a really good attendance which made all of the work in the intense rehearsal phase completely worth it! Tonight's final concert took place in the venue below, which was an old factory with a great acoustic and cool style. As well as the giant piece by Xenakis we performed pieces by younger up-and-coming composers

Do you ever leave a rehearsal and your brain is totally fried?! Today was this day for me... The above is a small excerpt of Jalons by Xenakis, a 20th century composer who was a brilliant mathematician and a trained architect. When in France Xenakis actually approached Messiaen for lessons, however Messiaen believed more in harmonic structure than mathematical and he pushed Xenakis to pursue his architectural, mathematical and Greek roots to structure his compositions in his

Last night we finished up the World Brass New Years tour in Ettelbrück in Luxembourg. After the concert we celebrated a fantastic tour with an equally fantastic dinner in Claude's (one of the groups trombone players) house in Luxembourg. This morning I travelled up to Dortmund and sat (and passed) my last exam in the Orchesterzentrum NRW. So I now officially have my Masters Degree from Germany! Over the next few days I will be preparing some new music for the Sinfonia NRW tou

Yesterday saw the midway point in our World Brass New Years tour. The concert last night was well received by a full house in Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Berlin, and the group also shared the concert with some poetry slammers (I hope that is the correct name...!). It was a really nice atmosphere and a very cool idea to have the programme interspersed with this different art form. I really enjoyed it! This evening we are performing on our own once again at the Kammermusiksaal in

Greetings and Happy New Year from a rather rainy and cold Berlin! I am currently away for two weeks on tour with World Brass in several different cities throughout Germany and one final concert in a few days in Luxemburg. We have already performed 3 concerts in Oldenburg, Bremen and Quedlinburg. Yesterday was a well deserved free day in Berlin where I managed to catch up with a friend who studied with me in Glasgow on the ERASMUS exchange programme a few years ago. It was gre