Joanne Green
What got you interested in music?
My mum was a music teacher and from my childhood taught piano at home, so the importance of music was always in my life. I learnt the violin, piano and clarinet as a child but wanted to go on and study medicine. In my gap year I was lucky enough to become a member of the Australian Youth Orchestra which happened to be touring Europe that year. I was just 18 and the age bracket was 18-26. Experiencing those seven weeks across Europe with Christoph Eschenbach conducting the main programme, a Prom with Charles Mackerras, and many super talented young musicians, changed my path. I came home to study music instead of heading to med school.
What was the first album you ever bought?
That’s a tricky one as my friends and I shared mix tapes rather than buy our own albums so I can’t really remember. Possibly the first album I bought was Nik Kershaw’s Human Racing and it was on cassette (shows my age!). The first classical album I bought when I was a teenager in Australia was Bournemouth Sinfonietta’s 1977 recording of Benjamin Britten’s Complete Music For Strings. I always thought it was quite cool that one of the first professional orchestras I had a trial with in the UK was Bournemouth Sinfonietta!
If you could see Scottish Ensemble collaborate with anyone who would it be, and why?
I’d love us to be the central subjects in a BBC drama. Something like the programme ‘Shetland’. What better way to get visibility and attract a new audience!
Biography
Australian by birth, Joanne followed her dreams on the violin and at the age of 23 found herself in London at the Royal College of Music on a postgraduate scholarship from the University of Melbourne.
Never heading back to the antipodes, she found her musical home with the Scottish Ensemble in 2003. The creative, innovative vibe generated by Scottish Ensemble spills over into the rest of Joanne’s life and influences how she approaches the rest of her portfolio career of performing, teaching and arts administration.
Joanne is passionate about sharing her music skills. She is Chair of the European String Teachers Association UK (ESTA UK), a member of the Somerset and Dorset Music Education Hub’s strategy board, and the founder of Breathe Music, an organisation in Somerset designed to bring first class classical music concerts to rural villages. She is currently a visiting music specialist at Wells Cathedral School and Kings Bruton School in Somerset, Bristol Grammar School, and enjoys being a tutor for the National Children’s Orchestra (NCO).
