Category Archives: Summer School Tutors

Susan Hollingworth

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Susan Hollingworth

Repertoire for Children’s and Youth choirs is Sue’s afternoon workshop at the Kodály Summer School 2017. Sue will lead a practical session, singing repertoire suitable for children and youth choirs of all abilities, trying various performance ideas and discussing levels of difficulty.

Sue is a graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music where she studied voice, Sue divides her time between her work as a Choral Director and Music Educator. In 1990 she was awarded a Churchill fellowship for her work with choirs. In 2010, she was awarded “Choir Master of the Year” by the Gramophone Magazine. This is a community music award, given to those who have made the greatest impact in their singing communities.

She is Creative Director of the Scunthorpe Co-operative Junior Choir. This open access choir won the overall title of BBC3 Choir of the Year in 2008. The choir was been awarded an IMove Grant by the Arts Council to stage a community opera for 1500 people as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012. This was called Cycle Song and received rave reviews. The choir took part in the BBC Proms in September 2009 singing Messiah. In 2000 they travelled to Sydney to take part in the Olympic Torch Processions; they sang at the opening night celebrations of the Millennium Dome and at the first Holocaust Memorial Service at Westminster. The Choir was chosen to make a BBC programme called “Take a Bow” and was the subject of a documentary on Radio 4.

Sue is Musical Director of the Sine Nomine International Touring Choir. All members of this choir are themselves choral directors. The choir has been the guest choir at Presteigne Festival, performed at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester and international festivals in Italy and Edinburgh.

In 2010, BBC Radio 3 invited Sue to lead performances of the Hallelujah Chorus in Glasgow and London with participants who are new to singing and who were encouraged to join a choir. For the BBC, she also conducted an afternoon Family Prom at the Albert Hall. She has worked for the National Youth Choirs of Scotland and Great Britain and is a guest conductor for Leeds Lieder.

Sue’s Music Education work has included creating Melody Monkey’s Marvellous Music Box with Cathy Dew, being an Advocate for Sing Up, working for the Voices Foundation and giving regular workshops for Making Music, 20,000 Voices and Sing for Pleasure. She has adjudicated for BBC3 Choir of the Year and for the Coleraine, Elgin and Don Valley festivals.

Miranda Zwalf

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Miranda-Zwalf

Miranda, BA; LRAM; DipRCM; CSAK (Colourstrings); C.K.M.E (Dist); won an Exhibition Scholarship at the Royal College of Music and every prize available to flautists. Miranda also has a degree in French from London University. She studied with Geoffrey Gilbert in the U.S.A. and performed at festivals there including Aspen and Grand Teton.
Miranda has worked with the Balearic Symphony Orchestra, played in ‘Les Misérables’, and was for several years Assistant Principal Flute in the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. She has taught Kodály on the String Training Programme at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and is currently teaching at the Stephen Perse Foundation in Cambridge.
Miranda is a lecturer in Kodály Musicianship at Birmingham Conservatoire and has taught for the British Kodály Academy, the Dalcroze Society, Colourstrings and NYCoS. She delivers In Service training in Kodály principles applied to instrumental and classroom teaching, and has published A Sound Beginning in Flute Playing – a Kodály based flute tutor. Most recently Miranda has developed PitchWizard, an App for sight singing which is now commercially available.

Holger Aston

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Holger AstonHolger is a pianist and cellist, having completed his musical studies at the Guildhall School of Music. In 2010 he spent a year in Kecskemet, Hungary where he completed a Master’s in Kodaly Pedagogy, graduating with Distinction. Holger teaches piano at Notting Hill and Ealing High School, musicianship and choir at Colourstrings Music School, and delivers a wide-range of music courses to adults at the Mary Ward Centre, Holborn.

Sally Leeming

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Sally LeemingSally is a singer and musicianship teacher living in Bingley, West Yorkshire. For many years she was a class teacher and KS2 Maths Co-ordinator.

Whilst teaching in the middle school she set up a project, working with a group of children from the local special school, and their teacher – Judith Brindle. The project involved singing and playing musical games together and was Sally’s first ‘proper’ introduction to the Kodály Concept of Music Education.

One of the aims of the project was to encourage Sally to incorporate her singing skills into the classroom. After the birth of her son, Sally attended courses run by Judith and The Voices Foundation. After hearing about the wonderful summer school from circa 1990 onwards, Sally finally made it to Leicester in 2003 and has attended the majority of summer schools since then, becoming a BKA tutor in 2014.

For the last few years Sally has worked on projects, incorporating Kodály musicianship, for the Northern Orchestral Enterprise Ltd (NOEL) in Halifax and the Sing Up Outreach Project for Bradford Cathedral and, in 2017 Sally presented a series of workshops at the Bradford Music Education Conference.

Sally teaches privately as well as singing as a soloist and in a variety of choirs. Since 2011 she has taught Kodály Musicianship in a state primary school in Queensbury, Bradford, West Yorkshire.

Zoe Greenhalgh

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Zoe GreenhalghZoe is a Kodály trained Early Childhood Music Specialist with a wealth of experience of working in a wide range of Early Childhood settings. She also provides bespoke training workshops for early childhood education and music practitioners and is an Associate Tutor in Early Years and Primary Education at Edge Hill University. A former BKA Trustee, Zoe is an active musician playing the viola.

Her qualifications include MA Education, Early Years; PDC (Early Childhood Music, Kodaly); PGCE; BA(Hons); RGN.

Allan Wright

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Allan-WrightAllan was born in the North-East of England, in the county of Northumberland. His love for music (and especially the voice) started at the age of ten when he joined a local Choir and realised that singing was the most fun anyone could possibly have, ever (even more fun than cake). He went on to become deeply passionate about musical theatre and continued his musical studies alongside his academic work in Phonetics and Phonology (degree from Manchester Metropolitan University).

Allan moved to France in his late twenties (possibly because of the cakes) and, whilst teaching at university, began to bring together his love of phonetics and the singing voice. His study of the physiological and acoustic aspects of the singing voice led him to start coaching injured singers needing rehabilitation work and, in 2010, to set up the evidence-based technique programme ‘l’académie du chanteur moderne’ (the modern singer’s academy), which has gone on to become one of the most popular singing programs in France (and is now fully funded by the French government for working singers).

In 2011 he also began training other singing teachers to work with this physiological and acoustic approach to the voice. Allan regularly coaches in-house for musical theatre and opera companies as well as working on healthy and versatile voice techniques with choirs, and artists from various musical fields (classical, rock, heavy metal, soul, RnB, pop, country etc) and often speaks at conferences on vocal pedagogy and new approaches.

Despite trying for many years, he remains unable to play the guitar, but maintains that singing is the most fun anyone can have, ever.

Alan Murdock

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Alan-MurdockAlan was born in N Ireland and his early musical training was in the local brass band. After music studies at Queen’s University Belfast, he taught in Belfast before moving to South London in 1988 where he concentrated on choral work in the John Fisher Comprehensive School.

He revived his interest in Kodály education, which he first encountered at London University, Institute of Education, with Cecilia Vajda, eventually completing an advanced course with Cecilia and attending Summer seminars regularly in Hungary and England. The Chapel Choir of boys in his school is one of the best known school choirs in the UK, getting into the finals many times of National competitions. The Boys’ Choir section reached the semi finals of the BBC’s Choir of the Year competition in 2000; achieved the “outstanding performance” award in the National Festival of Music for Youth in 2002; a “highly commended performance” award in 2004; finalist of the BBC Songs of Praise Choir of the Year 2006 and final six of the BBC Radio 3 Choir of the Year 2008. In 2010 the boys and mixed voice choirs were both South of England Area section winners of the BBC Choir of the Year. The school’s choral society has performed many of the major choral works like the Fauré Requiem, Mozart Requiem, Handel Messiah, Verdi Requiem, Britten War Requiem, Haydn Creation and Walton Belshazzar’s Feast and Louis Vierne’s setting of the Mass. Alan retired from class teaching in 2010 to enable him to further teach Kodály methodology in more schools and in the community.

Cyrilla Rowsell

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cyrilla_rowsellCyrilla gained a Bachelor of Education degree and then was a class teacher in First and Primary Schools for eleven years. During this time she became increasingly interested in the Kodály approach to music education, and subsequently attended many courses including Summer Schools in Britain and Hungary.

She obtained the British Kodály Academy’s Advanced Musicianship Diploma with Distinction in 1991. Since then Cyrilla has taught the Elementary and Intermediate Level year courses for the BKA and has taught solfège, methodology and conducting on BKA Summer Schools. She teaches in primary schools and on the String Training Programme at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Cyrilla has run courses around the country for organisations including the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, The Dalcroze Society, The National Youth Choir of Scotland, ESTA, the Shrewsbury Opera Project and for various schools and LEAs, including a year-long project in Barnsley and helping to plan a pre-instrumental musicianship course for children on the Isle of Man. She was the first advisory teacher for the Voices Foundation.

Cyrilla is currently writing the ‘Jolly Music’ scheme of books for primary age children with David Vinden.

Cyrilla has run a large junior age choir who won the Bromley Music Festival in 2000 with a high distinction mark of 96. The most experienced members of the choir performed both at the Royal Festival Hall in the Music for Youth Choral Day and at the Royal Albert Hall as part of a 500-strong Bromley choir at the 2002 Schools’ Prom. They performed many times at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, supporting the Band of the White Russian Army and the Croydon Philharmonic Choir.

Dr László Norbert Nemes

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Dr-Laszlo-Norbert-Nemes

Dr. habil. László Norbert Nemes is currently professor at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest and director of the International Kodály Institute of the Liszt Academy. His main areas of expertise are the theory and the practice of the Kodály Concept, musicianship training according to the Kodály Concept, choral conducting and choral music education. His most recent publications include a chapter on choral music education according to the Kodály concept in the Oxford Handbook of Choral Pedagogy published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Besides teaching at the Liszt Academy he maintains an active career as a choral conductor. Since September 2014 he has been artistic director of the New Liszt Ferenc Chamber Choir, the artist-in-residence choral ensemble of the Liszt Academy. In 2018 he founded the National Youth Choir of Hungary. For twelve years he worked as the associate conductor of the Hungarian Radio Children’s Choir. László Nemes has conducted, taught, held workshops, master classes and seminars all across Europe, in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the People’s Republic of China, Indonesia, Japan, the Korean Republic, Malaysia, The Philippines, Republic of China/Taiwan, Singapore and the United States of America several times. He is guest professor at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China. In recognition of his artistic activities he received the Bartók-Pásztory Award in 2005. In March 2017 he was decorated with the Golden Cross of the Hungarian Cross of Merit. He is vice president of the International Kodály Society, honorary member of the British Kodály Academy and patron of music education at National Youth Choir of Scotland.

Esther Hargittai

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Esther-HargittaiEsther was born in Hungary and emigrated to Israel at the age of 16. She has been immersed in music since the tender age of six, going through primary and secondary schools specializing in music and in 1995 graduating in Choir Conducting and Music Education at the prestigious Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Since graduating she has taught music and conducted choirs through all age groups: children through to adults. Esther set up one of the best known and most successful children’s choirs in Israel, the Efroni Choir, which she managed and conducted from1996 to 2005. The Efroni Choir had numerous performances in a variety of settings, from state ceremonies to children’s TV programmes and special concerts, as well as representing Israel abroad in the USA and France. Esther was also a major partner in conceiving and writing a Kodály Method teaching manual for music teachers in Israel, which was published by the Jerusalem Music Centre. Esther moved to the UK with her husband and family in 2006. Since then she has been engaged as a tutor on many BKA courses. She runs conducting and musicianship courses for choir trainers and class teachers from her home in Kent and has given successful conducting workshops elsewhere in the UK.