Today was the Trinity Laban Invitation Day. The idea behind it is to give those who have received an invitation the chance to find out a little more about studying at Trinity so they can decide between the various institutions who have offered them a place. In my case, as I only applied for Trinity and have no real doubts about the course, I mostly went along just to get a bit of a taster of what I can look forward to.

And it was a great day. We spent an hour in a composer workshop on writing for ethnic flutes, got to have a good chat with a couple of students over lunch, did a quick tour of the (gorgeous) campus and then had a meeting with the Head of the Composition Department, Dominic Murcott, who answered our questions and showed us some videos of interesting work by past students.

All great stuff and I can’t WAIT to get started. But the big issue of the day is the confirmation that we need to choose our own composition tutor. For me, this is incredibly difficult. In Australia, it probably would have been pretty easy because I’m so familiar with the work and history of so many composers, not just from concertgoing, but from my work at the Australian Music Centre. But here, I’m all at sea. Unlike, I suppose, many prospective students, I didn’t choose Trinity on the basis of a specific person teaching there, but instead on the approach of the college as a whole and the general broad stylistic bent of the teachers as a group.

So I don’t know who I want to study with. Dominic made some suggestions, based on my (rather vague) stated goal of finding someone to push me to try stuff I haven’t done before, but what it’s done is to make me really think about where I want to go with my composition. Sure I want to try new stuff, but I need to consider what sort of new stuff I want to try. Thoughts… thoughts…