Hello!
I've been thinking about change.
Lots of things happened in 2014. Memorably, it was the year I finished being a postgraduate student and decided not to be a career academic, and the year my friend Chris and I started Pennine Sinfonia. A wonderful, formative experience.
Pennine was an attempt to do a few things.
Firstly we were trying to play cool music, which we hadn't done before and we hadn't done at scale.
Ideally, we would also do creative fun things with other professionals, which we certainly achieved: Lots of networking came out of it and we made a lot of contacts which developed into other future professional relationships and friendships.
We raised quite a bit for charity.
Overall it was ace, but...
One thing we abjectly failed to do was to build an audience.
The first edition was reasonably well attended, and we did quite a good publicity job. Being embedded in the student environment of Huddersfield at the time meant that we had a captive population.
We blithely sent lots of emails and invited various people, including the local mayor at the time, and a whole host of others. That didn't translate to much repeatability; we had a really strong offering to begin with but we didn't really capitalise on this over time.
We did four projects and they all evolved - soloists and big repertoire. We planned a fifth for 2017 which never really came to pass - we both became busy with work and other aspects of life, so the energy somewhat went out of it. But it was a cool thing, and we were both very happy to have done it.
Chris's friend Louise made a lovely film about the first project.
I am still not very good at building audiences!
But this email list has about 100 people on it, and might even grow.
A year ago, I sent an email full of updates and new things, and now I have even more.
My working life is different again - I was a full-time lecturer at York Business School, and for almost a year I was in charge of their Project Management Degree Apprenticeship. I loved many parts of this, and towards the end of 2024 I was approached by a recruiter. Would I, they asked, possibly like to come and work for a private education provider instead? Initially this seemed like an odd move, but I learned a bit more, and now, to cut a long story short, I have moved to QA Ltd, where I am running their Project Management Degree Apprenticeship, with a bigger team and a lovely ethos.
My handful of musical things has shrunk, by choice, to a tinier number. I have a little plan of some side projects, but nothing regular at the moment. And that's OK! It's a strange thing to have a very large part of your identity move and shrink, but oddly liberating.
One space I am still chipping away at is (🙄) livemusictheory.com - you can sign up on that link if you're interested in testing out the free course. Which I will get around to finishing soon....
Three things you might enjoy.
1) Paul Graham's excellent writing (which I am very into), and specifically Do Things That Don't Scale
2) This brooding and intense documentary on Marco Pierre White which demonstrates that pro kitchens are not unlike the energy of pro orchestras (with equally irrational, yet compelling characters)
3) This excellent series of simple free tools which use understated AI to break down barriers in your work and life.
Thanks for reading! Next time, a short essay on solving problems.
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