It’s Been Five Months…

Well, give or take a week!

After 17 years working in Arts Management and doing all my singing and teaching on the side, it was five months ago that I finally took the leap, and decided that singing can be a full time thing.

It’s fair to say it’s not gone how I expected. I thought I was facing the challenge of slowly building my clientele while seeking out performance opportunities, and doing lots of freelance arts admin on the side.

Instead, I almost immediately got a glorious two full days of teaching a week in Durham, a busy contract with Hexham Abbey, and the private students came pouring in. I have zero complaints, but it’s been a very quick learning curve - going from mentally organising half a dozen private regular students, to having to administrate the development and progress of almost 70.

Teaching is my absolute passion, and I’m getting to work with such an incredible range of young people, literally from ages 8 - 80, teaching everything from Bach to BTS via Bernstein.

On top of that, I’m being given such glorious singing opportunities - in the next couple of months I’m doing concerts with three different choirs, singing solos in pieces I’ve never done before - two of which I’d never even heard of before! I’m getting to plan recitals by French women, and seek out repertoire for soprano and harp, and do all the nerdy things that there was never time for before.

I’m 42, and this was a big leap, but I’m so grateful to my wonderful students and the gorgeous music teacher network in Newcastle for helping me along. And also to my friend Emily who has nagged me to blog every day since I went freelance. Who knows, maybe I’ll find the time to do more than one…