Over the last years, my visits to Vyners School in Hillingdon have been a highlight of my school trips. Working this week with their A-level students in their fine, spacious music studio, several hours passed unnoticed (by me at least) as we looked through their compositions in quite a lot of detail. In my college/university teaching days, I rarely had this degree of access to student compositions while they were being written. It makes much more sense to review and discuss possible ways to go when the music is still in flux. My thanks as ever to head of music Dan Cullum and students for these always stimulating discussions.
PICTURED - walking to Vyners School through normal suburban streets, I often catch a thrilling distant glimpse of Swakeleys House, a superb-looking Jacobean mansion behind very locked gates. Online information about its current status is highly mysterious, and it seems the only recent opportunity for public access was for a few hours during Open House last September. Thinking of the workmanlike school and the super-private country house: parallel universes right next door to each other.
