Mentoring & professional development
Guidance for composers, arrangers, orchestrators and music teams who want their scores, their systems and their direction to hold up under professional pressure.
Some of the people I work with are established. Others are at music school, or just out of it, or writing seriously alongside another job. What matters is that you are working on something real and want it to be better.
I have orchestrated for sessions at Abbey Road, prepared materials for opera houses and world tours, and rebuilt more than one production where the music arrived unusable. I have mentored for the Auckland Philharmonia for over a decade, across their Our Voice workshops, Young Composer selection and schools programmes, and for the NZSO Todd Young Composer Awards and the Composers Association of New Zealand Composers Workshop. I guest lecture at the University of Auckland, UNITEC and MAINZ, and I was nominated for Music Teacher of the Year at the 2019 New Zealand Music Awards.
I teach what I have had to fix. The problems that cost people work are rarely the ones they were taught to look for.
Score and arrangement review
Send a score, an arrangement or a set of parts. I read it the way the musicians, the conductor and the librarian will read it, and return written notes with a recorded walkthrough. Orchestration, voicing, balance, playability, layout, and anything that will cost you rehearsal time.
Turnaround five working days. Up to six minutes of music. Send me anything longer and I will quote it.
If a review turns up more than notes can fix, I will tell you what a rebuild involves and what it would cost. No obligation, and the review fee comes off the quote.
Best for a piece heading to a session or a first performance, a portfolio score before it goes out, a submission you want checked properly, or work you suspect has problems you can no longer see.
NZD 600 plus GST
Sessions and project support
One to one sessions run on Zoom, on whatever is in front of you: a project decision, career direction, quoting and rates, portfolio and applications, or working through a score together. Send materials in advance and I will have read them before we start. Notation and workflow, built around your own files rather than a generic curriculum. Or ongoing support across a live project, where the job is bigger than anything you have taken on and the risk of getting it wrong is real.
Sessions from NZD 250 plus GST, with a reduced rate for students and those starting out. Longer engagements quoted on scope.
For teams and institutions I also take masterclasses, workshops and consultancy: orchestras, universities, publishers and production companies. Quoted on scope.
You may be able to seek funding for mentoring. Creative New Zealand and APRA both support professional development, and I am happy to write a quote and scope of work for an application.
Tell me what you need and I will tell you whether I can help. If you are not sure where you sit, ask anyway. I take a handful of mentoring clients a month.