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Title Training & Development Officer, Making Music Eastern

Organisation Making Music (National Federation of Music Societies)

How long in present post? Three and a half years

Phone 01692 407178

Email julie@makingmusic.org.uk

What does your organisation do?
Represents and supports voluntary (amateur) performing and promoting groups throughout the UK. Works at all levels to advance the cause of live music-making. Huge range of member services - financial, advice, information, training, etc

What does your current job involve?
? Working with the Making Music committee to assist and develop member societies.
? Provision of training events: artistic (e.g. choral workshops) or administrative ( e.g. seminars on funding or marketing / audience development).
? Running a 3-year RALP project - 'BREAKOUT!' - aiming to increase the performance and promotion of contemporary music by voluntary music groups.

Who did you used to work for and what did you do?
? Administrator Buxton Festival & Northern Chamber Orchestra.
? Norfolk & Norwich Festival: concerts manager and administrator of Festival chorus.
? I originally trained as a French teacher, but I escaped from teaching some years ago.

What do you enjoy most about your present post?
Planning a project and seeing it come to fruition: and working with music groups all over the region, as well as local authority arts officers and colleagues at the RABs and other agencies.

What do you find most difficult in your present post?
Working from home ? especially the lack of human contact. Also, fitting the work into the 3 days I'm paid for.

What is your career ambition?
To continue to work in some capacity at the sharp end of the music business.

Who has most influenced your career to date?
Helen Mitchell and Heather Newill, then Administrator and Director respectively of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival, who gave me the opportunity to change direction, treated me as a professional colleague and encouraged me to do the Arts Administration MA at Anglia Polytechnic University.

If you could have done any job in the world, what would it be?
Concerts Manager for an orchestra or a music festival.

If you had three wishes for the future of the arts, what would they be?
? That the music establishment recognises that to survive, it needs the voluntary sector
? Some core funding, as well as project funding, available for ALL arts organisations
? That the spectre of ?additionality? need not hinder the continuity of what arts organisations do best (or their ability to pay their core staff)