Creating Music

Craft is one form of expressing creativity - however, there are of course many different ways in which to be creative, of which one of the major is in creating music.

As any of you who have followed my blog for a while will know I play the violin, and for several years I was involved in playing with a couple of local amateur/community orchestras, first in England and then here in Brisbane.

In the UK I played for several years with the Slough Philharmonic Orchestra. They enjoyed an enviable reputation as one of the best musical societies in the country, not least because the society included a choir as well as an orchestra. I loved my time playing with the orchestra and learned many new orchestral pieces with them including what is now one of my all time classical pieces - the Gadfly by Shostakovitch. The society usually put on five concerts a year, three orchestral and two with the choir. If you live in the UK anywhere near to Slough then I can well recommend them. The only reason I left playing with the Slough Philharmonic was because I moved to Australia.

For the first few years of living in Australia, I joined and played with the Brisbane Symphony Orchestra, although at that time it was known as the Brisbane Sinfonia. Although a much newer orchestra than my UK orchestra the Brisbane Symphony was gradually gaining a very good reputation for the standard of their concerts. Again, I really loved playing with them and can certainly recommend paying one of their concerts a visit. Unfortunately I just found it too difficult to continue with my commitment to them at the time I left having got a job in the wrong direction from Brisbane from where I lived.

From playing in both orchestra one thing I will never forget is the thrill of playing at the concerts being surrounded by a large symphonic sound and knowing that I was a part of it.