Music teachers complete unique recording project

Two peripatetic music teachers at St Peter's School have recently worked together to complete a unique recording project. 

For is an album of solo piano music composed by Matthew Lee Knowles and realised by St Peter’s own Kate Ledger (piano teacher) and Sam Hobbs (drum teacher). 

After deciding to record some of Matthew’s music, the main challenge was simply choosing which pieces to play - Matthew has written enough solo piano music for around 45 CDs! Kate suggested focussing on the pieces Matthew writes FOR people, their titles being the person they are written for. 

The twelve musical portraits chosen for this album were written whilst thinking very deeply about the people in the titles. Matthew told Kate about these people and it was up to her how to interpret that information whilst not taking herself out of the equation.

Kate said: "People are complex and Matthew wants to write about complex things, because he enjoys the challenge. On the day of recording I went for it - in the mixing it was about asking “what did we capture, what did the engineer’s equipment pick up?” There were mistakes - people make mistakes -  and this whole album is a very human thing, so then it was a case of going with the errors, the glitches and being very open to the moment."

The two discs could have been one but Kate and Matthew wanted to create these two separate worlds. Matthew has an interest in cosmology and when deciding what to call the two parts and listening over and over he found himself repeatedly picturing black hole accretion disks, something so unimaginably beautiful, bigger than we can comprehend, so he called the two parts ACCRETION and DEBRIS. 

Kate is a piano teacher at St Peter's School and is currently completing a PhD at the University of York. She is a very respected player of brand new, cutting edge contemporary classical music.

Photo: Sam Walton Photography