Emma’s Articles

Does Birdsong Have the Same Origins as our Music? It’s always a privilege to work towards a performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, as I currently am …

Sometimes wind players are under the impression that the sound they make is purely due to their instrument. They create  oscillations in air flow by blowing across a reed, or …

Last year I had the pleasure of meeting the Beethoven scholar, Jonathan del Mar. I was just about to give a performance of Vittorio Monti’s Czardas, so we fell to …

Recently I was invited by my old secondary school to come and give a talk. They’d noticed a reduction in the number of students taking part in musical events, so …

The pandemic has really brought home to me how much the work of a concert artist is about bringing people together to share a musical experience. In normal times there …

Mozart, Haydn, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler, Bruckner, Schoenberg – it reads like a roll call of the great and good in classical music – but the amazing thing …

Running commentary (A few light-hearted lessons learned training for a half marathon) When you tell people you’re going to train for a half marathon they divide into two groups: the …

A look at the funnier moments in music….   SOMM Recordings have just issued a CD taken from a live performance by my instrumental group at the Turner Sims Concert …

The clarinet player who could arguably be said to have had the most influence on the history of twentieth century classical music is not a household name, nor even remotely …

Planes, Shower Curtains and Clarinet Reeds…… This may seem a disparate list of objects, but all of the above have an important thing in common: the Bernoulli principle. Bernoulli realised …