Tag: writing

Birmingham Music Making: the beginnings of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

Sarah K WhitfieldLeave a comment
Appleby Matthews in a black and white photo, he is looking over his shoulder. He is wearing small classes and a suit jacket.

Thomas Appleby Matthews (1884-1949) is a surprisingly unknown figure given his importance to music making in Birmingham. He was the first conductor of what became the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – then the City of Birmingham Orchestra.

He does have a Wikipedia article to his name, but no article in Grove Music (Oxford Music Online) – though he gets a mention in their article on Birmingham’s music history. I’ve been drawn into his story because of the commitment he had to put classical music where people already were – in local cinemas and theatres.

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Scrappy paperwork and beautiful fragments: our incomplete archives

Sarah K WhitfieldLeave a comment

[Digging through my google drive came across this that I wrote for a session on creative writing, and thought I’d share, though I’ve lost the picture I drew of the extremely Jeremy Bearemy style writing approach my work usually takes. Please enjoy!]

I wrestle with revisions on this one article for months on end. To keep the appearance of working on it, it’s always open somewhere in the eight microsoft word documents I have open at any given moment. I drag it out when I talk to students who are revising dissertations – and I show them that I am doing this too, it’s normal, I say, attempting to sound convincing, it’s a community of writers and we are all learning to write better. 

Except I’m not exactly doing writing, I’m just keeping a document open on my laptop. 

Realistically this is about as close as I’m getting at this point, because other than dithering about with paragraphs one and two, I’ve done nothing for months. The feeling of not having finished it is somewhere between the nagging sense of ‘I’ve left the hob on’, and the utter guilt of leaving my crying daughter in the arms of the childminder. ‘YOUR WORK SPOILS EVERYTHING’ she shouts, and I think, you know, you might have a point.  

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