5 Nice Things in 2025
Five nice things that mostly happened to me and the excellent musicians I'm lucky enough to get to work with. It's been a rather good year :)
Teaching with Riot: The culmination of the Riot-led project I had with the Lucerne Scholars at the Royal Academy of Music, wherein they all wrote and performed their own Fluxus scores, at the time - this was only January - made us all feel the year had already peaked. The way everyone dove into this project with just the right balance of humour and conscientiousness. The way things just kept ramping up, there seemed to be no limit. And it felt like the perfect way to start a year that would be filled with various kinds of teaching projects: my usual 4th year project at the Guildhall, a workshop for the RNCM, workshops on extended techniques at Clarimondo, Guildhall Summer School, Darmstadt, teaching in Oslo. I felt I was exactly where I wanted to be.
Meow.
Four new bands: It might be more like 2.5 since two of them contain the inimitable ✨Dominic Lash✨ but we formed a duo this year, which had its first outing at Rainy Days in Luxembourg: the idea was to play a little bit with our background mostly improvising together but to commission some new pieces. Scott McLaughlin, Angharad Davies and Jürg Frey wrote for us. I don’t know what to say other than that the programme turned out to be flippin’ ace. We want to do it again. And again.
The other band with Dom was his idea: he decided to put together a quintet to play Anthony Braxton’s work. Hey guys, there are proper jazzers in this band. We’ve had two gigs so far (in London and Cambridge). Generally the improvising side of life has been treating me very, very well lately such that I’m doing more and more of it solo. I did a solo improvisation at the Clarimondo festival last May. Playing a solo improv in front of an audience of about 200 clarinet players wasn’t scary at all. Nope, no sir. (Although like so many things once I got going it was a heck of a lot of fun. And felt very much worth it when the lovely group of amateur clarinetists came up to me and one lady said, “You’ve made multiphonics so beautiful”…)
And finally - speaking of bands that play with the intersection of notated and improvised music (seems to be a real theme at the moment) - I had my first gig with Skogen. This Swedish group has been on the scene for 20 years (as of this year in fact) and Magnus Granberg wrote a new piece for an especially large version of the band, with performances in Stockholm and London. This also meant sharing the most charming flat with Angharad Davies for a week. I think if our cats had been with us we wouldn’t have ever left.
I live for cosy old fashioned hotels and this was the peak. Two trips to Oslo: I had two great and quite different visits to the Norwegian capital this year. The first to play in the Vigelands Mausoleum with Eva Zöllner (my duo partner of 10 years as of next February!). Extraordinary space with the most bonkers acoustic. The second of which was to spend a few days teaching at the Music Academy, as well as recording Martin Rane Bauck’s piece for cello, bass clarinet and piano, Okeanos, at the Rainbow Studio in Oslo. The former was at the invitation of Kristine Tjøgersen and Bjorn Nyman, who have managed to create the great unicorn of projects for me there: both the clarinetists and composers were together to learn about the clarinet in new music. I taught the composers how to write for it (with clarinetists there to watch), and taught the clarinetists how to play the techniques (with composers there to watch). Now those composers are busy writing pieces for those clarinetists and I’ll go back in March to hear the results. It happens so rarely that an institution can get these groups together and it was so, so much better than what I usually do: teach the composers, who then write for me.
This is where sibling rivalry gets you A lot of things are just generally great about visiting Oslo: getting to spend time with my old friend Martin Rane Bauck and his dog, Argos; drinking a lot of coffee and eating pastries; getting to spontaneously see my friend Alex Hawkins playing at Cosmopolite.
Argos! Prince of Finnish Lapphunds!
Music Patron: I joined Music Patron in June 2025 for two days a week, ostensibly as their social media gal but in September when an (excellent!) colleague left I was promoted to Community and Platform Manager. But I have been given so much freedom and trust and support in the role by the CEO. It feels incredibly creative, I feel useful and productive and I have such hope that this platform will bring so much to our scene. It has the potential to change it so radically, and to bring such a wealth of new music into the world. If you’re reading this and you don’t know what Music Patron is, please do check out the website - and if you’d like to consider supporting one of our composers that would of course be amazing (and if you need help choosing, do send me a message!).
Darmstadt: my first year teaching at the famed summer course for contemporary music and an all-career highlight. I adored my class, who it seemed to me all had their unique strengths, and we celebrated them all, and worked on new things, and talked and played and talked and played. Group class was intended to be an hour but regularly stretched to two, two and a half: no one had as many individual lessons as I intended as a result but this was better. Two sub highlights: the last Friday I asked them to make career ‘pies’, making the slices different sizes to reflect the different aspects of their careers, and we shared them. And they all did this with such openness and support for each other that I was so moved, I afterwards went outside and needed to find Cassandra Miller to have a hug and a cry. The second: playing Marc Andre’s extraordinary, extraordinary …selig sind… for clarinet and electronics in the Orangerie. One of the best performance experiences of my life (and rather the right place to have it in, eh).
there are so many photos of me at Darmstadt, pointing in various directions. Apparently that’s how I teach things.
Honourable mention: Jürg Frey’s new Clarinet Quintet. Really, this will be on next year’s list because while we’ve made the recording now, the premiere isn’t until next spring, after the record comes out, so maybe I shouldn’t even mention it but
eeeeeeeeeeee