The other day I was part of a coffee gathering where people from various lines of work were talking about their experiences of writing 'risk assessments'. They described the complicated forms that had to be filled in and the efforts to explain what preventive measures...
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Channel 4's series The Piano began its second series last night. It's always interesting to see the different playing styles of the pianists who put themselves forward to play a station piano in front of a crowd of listeners. Some of them play beautifully. However,...
Today is 'World Piano Day' (as if every day wasn't piano day!) and Yale University Press has been tweeting a little clip of me talking about the French pianist-composer Hélène de Montgeroult. De Montgeroult is one of the pianist-composers featured in my new book Women...
We generally try to make our own decorations for our home-made Christmas cake. We used to attempt traditional scenes of snowmen, sledging, fir trees, snowballs etc. In recent years, after icing the cake, we've switched to making animals out of the leftover icing. Each...
Every winter at around this time, we see a kind of bird we never see at any other time of the year. Fieldfares, which are large thrushes, arrive from Scandinavia and eat the last of the berries on the rowan tree outside our kitchen window. First we notice that the...
In our student days, those of us studying music (and in fact anyone who wanted to continue their piano studies) were allowed to hire upright pianos and put them in our rooms. Not infrequently there were two or more people on the staircase with pianos in their rooms -...
I often tweet about music and related matters. Usually the response is small - I'm thrilled if my tweets reach a couple of hundred people. So my experience yesterday was exceptional. I was watching The Queen's funeral which, as you'll know, had a variety of music in...
There's news today of an important new women's health strategy in England. 'Ministers have vowed to tackle decades of “systemic” and “entrenched” gender health inequality in England with plans to introduce compulsory women’s health training for doctors, more cancer...
I have been following - online - the Van Cliburn piano competition which takes place every four years in Fort Worth, Texas. As well as being one of the world's most prestigious it must be the most generous, with an array of prizes and offers of management, concert...
I was discussing 'Strictly' with a friend who's also a fan of the show. He asked me: 'How do you think it would work if celebrities were partnered with professional pianists, to learn to play the piano in a few weeks and then perform, say, a piano concerto in front of...
The autumn season of Strictly Come Dancing is under way and this year the judges seem inclined to give us a bit more insight into what they are looking for. I have enjoyed learning more about posture, weight, inside edges, head position, arm extensions, 'spotting' ( a...
One of the most depressing sights of lockdown in Edinburgh - for me, anyway - was the sight of the Usher Hall being turned into a Covid test centre. I know that test centres are important. But it seemed a sad change of fortune for the first big concert hall I got to...
Last week I was thinking of writing a blog post about knitting. What is the connection between knitting and pianism, you may ask? Well, I had been reading about the 19th-century pianist Clara Schumann, who continued to tour and earn money for the family after her...
This morning I heard a report about scientists who have made a list of recommendations for touring musicians to cut back on carbon emissions. Amongst other things it recommended that musicians should use instruments or equipment 'held by the venue'. Good luck with...
![No more bullfrogs […for now]](https://www.susantomes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/IMG_20210816_155540976-rotated-1-400x250.jpg)
My readers will know that I hate people coughing in concerts. I don't mean the sudden cough that the person can't help and does their best to stifle - I mean the self-indulgent barking cough which rings out across the hall and seems to be targeted at specially quiet...