Emerging Professionals - Sarah Small

Sarah Small

Fretwork was extremely fortunate to receive a Culture Recovery Grant from Arts Council England in April. It has allowed us to rehearse regularly over the last few months, expanding our repertoire and developing new projects and concert programmes, and we’ll be recording the work we’ve been doing here in the blog.

Our funding has allowed us to support several emerging professional players who have recently graduated from music college, inviting them into rehearsals and funding places for two students on the Dartington Summer School viol consort course.

Sarah Small, who studied at the Royal College of Music with Reiko Ichise and with Hille Perl in Bremen, joined Fretwork for several sessions, playing consort music by Ferrabosco, Ward and some of the new commissions from the ‘Albion’ project. It was a real pleasure to play with her, and here are her reflections on the rehearsals:

“It has been a wonderful experience to play together with Fretwork.

Not only was it an opportunity to play unfamiliar repertoire, but also gave me a better understanding of how different playing styles can blend together and contrast within the consort to bring new ideas through the texture. I mostly played an inner part, which I don’t usually do, and enjoyed the subtleties of the inner voices and hearing how ideas are initiated and communicated.

In one session, we sight-read a few new compositions. Some of these were quite rhythmically complex, really highlighting the importance of being aware of the other parts as well as your own in order to pick out the relating phrases or rhythms, which in turn can make a page of music that appears very daunting on first glance into quite an obvious pattern when combined with another part.”