Part of the summer school involved visiting talks by accomplished composers and one such event was the talk by head of Queen’s Music Judith Weir on Tuesday the 7th of August at the Purcell school who had a conversation with David Horne over different aspects of being a composer as well as what works in certain pieces and including performances of a piece she wrote for Violin and Cello: “Sundew” which was enjoyable due to the dissonances which worked together to give a very fearful impression of the plant the piece was written about.

This was very helpful for my week of composition as many of the things that were discussed proved to be beneficial for the writing of my piece such as tips that were given related to repetition, reusing material and not using too many ideas all of which were incorporated in the piece I wrote. It was also interesting to see different examples of pieces featuring graphic scores such as Sylvia Lim’s “Paper Wings” which was performed on sight by some people randomly selected from the audience.