Through Coloured Glass 2025 – Summer Course

The course is an intensive weeks work and development of remarkable music to be performed to an invited audience.

The repertoire this year will be just as inspiring but different, so if you wanted to return for another fabulous weeks playing and development, you won't be playing the same music.

Stillness is vital to our well-being – to our ability to reflect. Many people look to music to find solace and to use it as a focus or channel for their personal trials and tribulations. I have created a meditation that is a musical & spiritual journey that takes you from the troubles of the world, towards a still point, and then leads you forward, preparing you to go back to the hurly-burly, refreshed. In performance, the music is threaded together and is played continuously. It serves as a meditation for player and listener alike, making a performance more of an event, than a concert.

The music I have chosen was written by some of the greatest composers of the Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic eras. It is music from the heart, to the heart written by men grounded in their faith and craft. Sure, their art had a place in the life of their society, they wrote for their church, the buildings that housed it, for Princes, aristocrats, Kings and Queens. Both sacred and secular music work together side by side – they are the stuff of life. The Ayres of Dowland, the Chansons of Lassus, meld with Anthems, masses and motets.

I created this way back in 2007. This is the programme (with some additions) that String Theory Cello Ensemble performed. We played a Long Meditation for the evening and a Short Meditation for lunchtime concerts. We played in cabaret bars with a light show, colouring the musical drama. Our audience sat at candle-lit tables sipping wine. When we played in churches, some audience members lay down on the pews to listen. Like that ensemble, we will perform publicly, using lighting and other media to illuminate the event. We were signed to a Canadian agency that loved this theatrical mode of performance.

A reiewer said of one of our performances “It spoke the language of eternity”.

Launched in 2022, this adventurous course is open to applications from advanced cellists who are Grade 7 minimum and professional players who rehearse and develop a programme of stunning music and then present it as a public concert. The music will be sent out two months in advance so it is well-known before rehearsal and development begins.