Hello everyone! I'm sorry I have been terrible about updating this thing. I will try to remember as much as I can here. I am almost finished with my first term. Our last class is Friday. I have been learning so much and it's been very busy. Lately it's been a struggle just to learn the required music well enough to get by in each class on top of the daily exercises. We usually only have two days to try to learn the next piece or set of etudes and studies. Trevor can be brutal with his criticism (about our playing and our personalities.) I still think he is brilliant and probably one of the best flute pedagogues of our time. He has got his teaching method down to a science even if it does mean kicking us when we play something wrong! I am finished with my term paper on The History of the Flute Prior to 1720 and learned so much by doing the research for it in Trevor's library. The great thing about his library is that you can read about an ancient flute, and then find the actual specimen in his collection and check it out and play it! Did you know that there was a flute discovered in a Neanderthal campsite and it is predicted to be anywhere 43,000 to 82,000 years old?! It was made from a cave bear femur bone (unfortunately, Trevor does not have this one in his collection!) He does however have a flute that he made from the tibia bone of a woman who used to live in Elmsted...and he hops around on one foot while he plays it.
The village in the fall was beautiful and I think I'm in for my first real winter! The "gritter" (salt truck) drove by last night. We were walking back from class the other day and a pony ran up to us! It looked at us for a few seconds, but when we tried to pet it, it galloped back to its mother. The poor sheep have just been sheared and its so cold outside. But then again, its been raining a lot too, so maybe they're happy to lose their soggy wool. The other day we were taking a cab to the airport (going to Rome) at 3:30AM and we passed by a grassy area with maybe 20 rabbits all together! It was such a sight to see wild rabbits in the early morning like that. Our nightly walks are getting colder, but the cats still come out to visit because they know Trevor is carrying pockets full of shrimp and cat biscuits for them. We have another village whist tournament on Friday. Did I mention that I won the last one? I had the top score of the night and brought back a box of chocolates to my flatmates! Lindsay and I cooked Thanksgiving dinner for the whole studio at Trevor and Dot's house. Neither of us have ever done this before, but I must say it was a great success. They all loved it and I don't think the Japanese and and Croatian girls had ever seen that much food on one table before!
We went to a Royal Philharmonic Concert at Royal Albert Hall which was great. We have been to several classes at the Royal Academy of Music and I learn a lot from just observing William Bennett coaching other students. Also, we had a pianist, Juliet Edwards, come to the studio and give us a class. Some of her advice to me was exactly the right thing I needed to hear and will be helpful thoughts for me for a long time. We got to visit Albert Cooper in his nursing home and played a concert for him and the others there! For the non-flutists out there: Albert Cooper has been one of the leading developers of the mechanics of the flute in the 20th century. He invented the scale that flutes are built with today-mine even says Cooper scale on it. We also played a concert for the Gardener's Society in the village hall last night and our next one coming up is at the 12c. Hastingleigh Church on Saturday!
We just got back from the Italian Flute Society convention in Rome! It was totally unorganized in the typical Italian way, but we did hear some good concerts and classes. Barthold Kuijken was there and gave a fantastic baroque flute concert as well as a class! Other celebrity concerts included Emily Beynon, Andrea Oliva, Felix Renggli, Angelo Persichilli, Matthias Zielgler and many more. We also finally got to see Trevor's Carnival concert which is hilarious. We had a little sightseeing time to and got to go to St. Peter's Basillica, the Fontana di Trevi, the Spanish Steps and the Colusseum-all incredible! I celebrated my birthday at a restaurant in Rome where the waiter went around to every table to tell them and the whole place sang, "Happy Birthday to Giuditta!" We stayed in a bed and breakfast near the convention center which was the closest and least expensive that we could find and it turned out to be absolute luxury. It was a beautiful place that served us breakfast in bed every morning, had a great balcony, heated towel racks and even a maid service so that when we returned in the evening, our clothes were folded and put in the closet, the books on the nightstand were neatly stacked and everything perfectly tidied! I've never experienced anything like that before!
Winter break is from Dec. 16-Jan. 7 and Adam is coming to visit!!!!!! I'm of course counting down the hours until he gets here. He has booked a music tour for himself and is beginning in Ireland right now. He will come to the Dairy on Monday and after a few days here we will travel together to the cities where he's booked shows including London, York, Amsterdam, Glasgow and possibly Edinburgh for New Years! He has friends we can stay with in a lot of these places. I couldn't be happier. :)
I will work on uploading the pictures today. It will take forever on dial-up, but hopefully I'll get some posted. I will try to write another blog after the break. Thank you for all the birtday emails and facebook posts! I have enjoyed hearing from people back home. Please let me know what's going on in your lives as well! Happy Holidays to those who are celebrating and I hope to hear from you all soon!

As of yesterday, I have been here for one month! The days are much busier in the studio now. Trevor keeps adding more and more exercises to our daily practice routines and on top of learning new repertoire and etudes every week, we can barely get through it all. He kindly asks if anyone needs a do-it-yourself suicide kit yet when he goes to the store. Yesterday he told us that we are all sounding better than we did when we arrived here which is a compliment that makes all the hard work worth it! We have weekly listening projects and are now starting to do the research for the big term paper on the history of the flute. This week, one of my assignments is to learn the fingerings on the baroque flute. We have attended two flute studio classes at the Royal Academy of Music in London now. One was Shashank, the Indian bansuri artist, and the other was William Bennett. It was great to finally hear the famous WIBB! Flute class at the academy lasts from 10am to 6pm. I think students just reserve the entire day for it!
If you’ve been watching the news, you may know that blue-tongue disease has hit the UK for the first time ever. It is very sad because once an animal gets infected by a fly it must be killed to try to stop the spread of the disease. It would die in three weeks even if the farmers didn’t kill it. Luckily for us, humans cannot be infected, but recently, it has been as close as 15 miles from our village and we hope it doesn’t come any closer!
Some people from the village (Sue and her 11-year-old son, Robbie) came over to teach us the card game, Whist. Students from the studio usually participate in the village Whist tournaments, and our first one is this Friday at the pub. This is how we will get to know some of the villagers. Our other big recreational event for the past couple of weeks was watching the French film, Jean de Florette. It took us three sittings to get through the whole thing because it’s about four hours long and because the electricity went out while we were watching one night. It’s sort of depressing, but very good so I recommend it. Last Sunday evening we had the other students over for taco night at The Dairy. Lindsay and I have been craving our staple Mexican food so we introduced it to the other girls and I don’t think they had ever seen anything like it. We even made sopapillas for dessert.
Last weekend we ventured to Preston in Northern England for a masterclass with Robert Dick. He’s probably the best-known composer of contemporary flute music and genius at extended modern flute techniques. The event was put on by the British Flute Society who invited us to come for free. His lecture was very interesting and he played a concert of seven of his compositions. It was extraordinary to hear him perform them. Since it was a small group, we got to go out to dinner with him and really spend time talking to the man who is helping to shape the future of the flute. The only downside was the seven hour train ride each way getting there and back, but we were excited to see more of the country and to stay in a hotel room for a night!
We also went to Canterbury a couple of weeks ago. It’s 9.5 miles from where we live, but we’ve only been once so far. The main road we took to get there was built by the Romans 2000 years ago and is still heavily traveled by cars today! We passed the Chaucer Hospital on the way. I did not know that Canterbury is basically a big outdoor shopping mall. The big cathedral there is the main attraction, but we have not explored that yet. Tonight we are going to a pub where we will hopefully get some authentic fish and chips. I’d better go finish practicing before we leave! I hope everyone’s doing well back home. As they say here, Cheers!

Greetings from England

Hi everyone. I’m trying to get a blog going and the first entry will be long since so much has happened in my first couple of weeks in England. If you’re not interested, please do not feel obligated to read it! I arrived safely, but not without hassle. The flight I originally booked was cancelled along with everything coming out of Atlanta due to heavy thunderstorms and a tornado warning. Needless to say, Hartsfield was even more of a zoo than usual. The flight they switched me to was in another terminal and was already boarding by the time they told me where to go, so I ran to the gate only to find out that the plane was having electrical problems and would be delayed anyway. When I got to London, I stood in the passport clearance line for 2 hours. My bags weren’t there and the man who was supposed to pick me up was expecting me in another terminal. I went to the other terminal, and he went to the terminal where I was before so we missed each other again. I converted some money to pounds, bought a phone card and called my teacher who then called the man picking me up and I eventually found him and Lindsay. When we got to the car, I made my first dumb American mistake and tried to get in on the driver’s side. My bags arrived 6 days after I did and had tags on them from their brief journey to Geneva...what?!
The village is beautiful. Because it has been officially recognized as a place of outstanding natural beauty, it is against the law to widen the roads or to do anything to disturb the way it is and has been for centuries. I live in Elmsted and the studio is in Hastingleigh. It’s takes about 30 minutes to walk between the two and the hills seem to last forever because the road winds and we can’t see the top as we go. We don’t mind though, because the view is magnificent. We walk by cows, sheep, horses, chickens, cats, dogs, badgers, mice, pheasants, deer, and every now and then, a person. We walk every night with Trevor, who carries pockets full of dog and cat biscuits to feed to the animals. Stopping at “thinking gates” every night, we enjoy the uninterrupted view of the stars in the sky and the fresh breeze in complete silence. We have also explored the Hastingleigh and Elmsted churches. Both were built ca. 1100 and are still in use today. The iron bowl they use for baptizing babies is original to the church and they keep a record on the wall of every baby to ever be baptized in it. There are names carved in stone of people who were leaving to fight in the Crusades and did not expect to return. I find it absolutely fascinating to explore these buildings. The flute studio will give a Christmas concert for the village in the church on December 15.
All the students are very nice people and I’m enjoying getting to know them. Lindsay is from VA, Mime and Ritsuko are from Japan, and Marta is from Croatia. We range in age from 19 to 25. I live with Lindsay and Mime. Mime didn’t speak English when she got here, but she learns fast and we now communicate pretty well as she is learning more words and we are learning which words she knows and which she doesn’t. We are eating food of every nationality except English. Trevor made Shabu Shabu for us one night. That’s very thinly sliced raw beef that you dip in sort of a fondue pot of beef stock. You pick up one slice with chopsticks, cook it in the pot, dip it in sauce, and eat it. After the meat is finished, we put noodles, leeks and chives into the leftover beef stock to make soup on the table. For dessert there was a big bowl of mango and persimmon with cream to pour on top. Complete with fancy chocolates and plenty of wine, we could barely move afterwards, but Trevor still insisted that we go for our walk!
We went to London to visit Buckingham Palace the other day. They let people walk right through it! It is exquisitely over the top in its decorations. Famous paintings hang on the walls, silk curtains, harpsichords and pianos, a table formerly owned by Napoleon, hidden doors. There is a room that displays everything from Princess Elizabeth’s royal wedding. The ornate dresses and suits are on display and jewelry with diamonds that look to be an inch in diameter. After that, we went to the National Gallery and saw original paintings by Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, da Vinci, and Rembrandt to name a few. It’s a good thing that there are signs on the sidewalks reminding pedestrians which way to look before crossing the street in London, or I would have been hit by a bus in no time! We will return to London tomorrow evening to attend flute class at the Royal Academy which we are always invited to do. It will be a guest lecturer performing on Indian bansuri and explaining the structure of a Raga to us.
I’m learning so much here. Our days are saturated with flute-practicing the flute, listening to flute recordings, reading books about the flute, attending classes about the flute, and talking about the flute. I have so much to practice that after five hours, I feel like there’s still hours of material left that I haven’t worked on yet. It’s exciting though to finally be putting in really consistent concentrated work into practicing without it all being directed toward preparing for a recital, a jury or an audition. This year will go by very quickly and I feel pressure to get as much as I can out of each day. Well, if you’ve made it this far, you must be either a true friend, or you are really bored! I am interested in knowing what’s happening back home too, so email me your updates!