
This is my first year at the Sound and Music Summer School and I love it! Everyone is very friendly and all the sessions are really interesting, despite sometimes being quite challenging! I am most certainly learning something new every day! My only criticism is that the taster sessions are really short, and I would […]

The SaM Summer School has been great so far! I’ve found the taster sessions most enjoyable, as we got to explore composing for different genres of music. I’ve also learnt a great deal from the workshop sessions too, as we’ve been able to associate with other musicians who play the same instruments. The musicians are […]
At the SaM Summer School, we spent the mornings of the second and third days doing taster sessions to try other types of composition! One of those was composing film music. Our task? To compose a piece of film music for a short 25 second snippet from film The Grand Budapest Hotel! We had 25 […]

I found the film taster session enjoyable, however also challenging because of the limited amount of time we had to complete our compositions! We needed to consider hit-points and represent actions that occurred in the short film clip to emphasise and convey emotions that the audience would understand. For my piece, I used quiet scalic […]

The taster sessions have been both informative and challenging. The Jazz session involved modes, jazz notation and improvisation, which meant we had to think on the spot and remember the notes and patterns. The film taster was also done under time and so we had a limited period in which to compose a solo cello […]
As part of the experience at the SaM Summer School, everyone has a chance to experience a taster session with the four tutor groups other than your primary one. In the film group, I had 25 minutes to write a short piece for solo cello to accompany a film showing a dramatic scene of a […]
The taster session for the film course involved us having to score a thirty second clip from “The Grand Budapest Hotel”! We had to write a solo cello line, which I have never done before (let alone writing for the moving image). The whole experience was brand new for me, and I really enjoyed it. […]

For the second and third days of the summer school, the morning’s activities involved us partaking in hour long sessions with all of the key tutor groups. One of today’s sessions was with the Film Group, and involved writing a short piece for cello to accompany a short film. Crucial moments were identified (known as […]
I think everyone found the film taster session enjoyable but challenging! Nonetheless, it deserves to be said that the staff were incredibly supportive and useful, offering detailed advice on how we should consider writing for the given scenarios of the short film we encountered. It was a deeply commendable experience.