I hope you’ve all had a good summer of music-making, now that courses and summer schools are returning after the pandemic. The very hot weather wasn’t terribly good for instruments – at least, for strings and keyboards – do winds suffer from hot weather problems too?
Fortunately the heat hadn’t got started when we had our two recent workshops, both very successful – Angus Smith in Thorverton and Alison Kinder in Thornbury. Numbers weren’t quite back to the prepandemic level, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction. Your committee is planning a full programme of events for the rest of the year and into 2023, mostly face-to-face. However, members have told us that, for various reasons including health and geography, they’re unable to get to live workshops so they’ve really appreciated the online sessions over the past two years; we’ll therefore be continuing with occasional Zooms. And given that the Zoom AGMs have attracted much larger numbers than was ever the case when they were held during a live workshop, we’ve decided to hold this year’s AGM online too – so we’ll look forward to seeing you on September 24th .
This is the last Chair’s piece I will be writing to you, as I am standing down from my role as SWEMF Chair at the AGM. I’ve done the job for ten years, and have enjoyed it enormously, though I didn’t imagine when I took it on that I would be steering the organisation through a pandemic! The committee is granting me a final indulgence by agreeing that I should give a Zoom talk on November 19th about the mathematics of tuning and temperaments, which allows me to combine my twin passions of mathematics and music – I hope to see some of you then.
I will have more to say at the AGM, but I’d just like to place on record here my gratitude to our committee, to all the people who over the years have planned and organised events – and to all of you who keep SWEMF active and thriving. Long may it flourish!
– Clare