Tonebase 2024

Rachel is professor of historical flutes at the Royal College of Music in London. Her thriving class attracts traverso players and keen modern flautists alike, and she also gives classes ornamentation and cadenzas, open to all students.

Rachel has given masterclasses in the USA, Canada, Spain, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Croatia, Brazil, Argentina and New Zealand.

A dedicated teacher, Rachel began giving lessons at the age of sixteen when she was asked to help out with the younger players at her school and within a year of leaving the Royal Northern College of Music she was appointed as baroque flute teacher. After many years at the RNCM she went on to teach at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, the Birmingham Conservatoire and as lecturer in classical studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Always enjoying working with children, Rachel has taught recorder at Wells Cathedral School and at City of London School.

For ten years she ran her own music group, Hummingbirds, for pre-school children.

She teaches in her studio at home, gives occasional lessons on Skype or Zoom to students abroad and from time to time organizes classes in London.

RECENT NEWS

A TRIBUTE TO BACH:

BACH SONATAS & ARIAS

with Laurence Cummings, harpsichord, the London Handel Players and singers Elizabeth Cragg, Charles Daniels and Peter Harvey.

"So beautiful...If you want a flautist's guide to Bach, I don't think it comes much better than this".

Record Review, BBC Radio 3, 2nd April, 2016

"the range of tone colours conjured up by a mere wind instrument…was amazing…In fact, the Sarabande alone was so bewitchingly improvisatory that, the first time I heard it, I had to listen to it three times. Such effortlessly organic ornamentation, the sense at times mournful, at times utterly spiritual, and all from a single flute!"

Music & Vision