Brand new for 2025, and by popular demand – we’re so pleased to be hosting a midweek course for woodwind players interested in the English folk repertoire and style. The course will be led by Andy Watts, Finn Collinson, and Sam Partridge, three wind players whose expertise covers both a multitude of styles and historical periods.
This will be an opportunity to breathe some life (pun intended) into the English folk dance tunes currently dormant in manuscripts in the library, waiting to be discovered and reinvigorated.
During the week, you’ll also explore the music of some 17th century Broadside Ballads, as well as diving into the techniques you might need to own these tunes on your woodwind instruments.
You’ll (hopefully!) leave Halsway with a deeper understanding of, and connection to, folk repertoire as wood-wind players, and with the tools to enjoy this repertoire authentically, as well as having made new friends and been a member of an exciting new wind ensemble!
Who is is for?
This course is suitable for players of all wood-wind instruments, who consider themselves to be working at an intermediate or advanced level.
Diatonic instruments will be welcome, providing you have a range of instruments that enable the playing in keys of up to 4 sharps or flats (e.g. whistle players will need to bring several different instruments along).
You don’t need to be able to read music for this course, but the focus will be on learning by ear. However, if this is new to you, the tutors will be sharing tools and techniques to help you approach the skill, and notation can be made available during the course if absolutely required.
You’ll receive a timetable in advance and other material during the course, and you won’t need to prepare anything in advance.
The Team
Andy Watts grew up with ‘early music ’in the 1960’s thanks to an enthusiastic teacher in his Yorkshire primary school who was a fan of David Munrow. Shawms, crumhorns, recorders and viols were just as much a part of Andy’s musical life as clarinet and subsequently bassoon.
After graduating from Cambridge University, he studied bassoon and recorder at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and baroque bassoon at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. In the 1980s, he was musical director for touring theatre company The Medieval Players and went on to play with a number of renaissance music ensembles and with many of London’s period instrument orchestras, including The Academy of Ancient Music and The English Baroque Soloists. In 1984, he formed The Carnival Band, who have won acclaim for their recordings and live performances with folk-rock star Maddy Prior. They are also the lead ensemble in the 100 Ballads project, which was awarded the Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History by the American Historical Association.
A keen music educator working with children and adults, Andy previously taught at the Royal Academy of Music and continues to teach at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. As musical director of Shropshire Harmony Quire, he is exploring the Country Psalmody of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Not one to stand still, he has recently taken up jazz clarinet as a refreshing change from historically informed performance!
Finn Collinson is a recorder player, multi-instrumentalist, folk musician and composer based in Suffolk, UK. Finn’s classical training continues to inform his performance and composition within the folk world, where he often uses fragments of historical music and collaborates with a range of different performers from varied backgrounds.
Widely regarded as one of the foremost recorder players on the English folk circuit, Finn has released two solo albums, Call To Mind (2019) and The Threshold (2022), to critical acclaim. A diverse performance career has seen Finn play on the main stages of many of England’s biggest folk festivals, and venues ranging from tiny 50-capacity arts centres to the Royal Albert Hall. Finn also performed in the orchestra for the English National Opera’s Olivier Award-winning production of Noye’s Fludde in July 2019.
As an educator, Finn works extensively with FolkEast (notably as curator of the festival’s Youth Moot workshop programme). In 2022-23, he was a lead tutor on the East Anglian Traditional Music Trust’s youth showcase project, and he has also undertaken visiting teaching roles with the English Folk Dance & Song Society, Newcastle University and Britten Pears Arts.
A compelling and respectfully innovative musician, Sam Partridge is a multi-instrumentalist, primarily heard performing on the Concert Timber Flute or English Concertina. Specialising in traditional music from across the British Isles, Sam plays in an eclectic variety of ensembles performing at festivals and venues throughout the UK and abroad. An accomplished composer, frequently contributing his efforts to the folk repertoire, he is also a highly skilled and committed educator – most notably, perhaps, as an Artistic Director of the National Youth Folk Ensemble – who has experience teaching on the Folkworks programme at Sage Gateshead and at Folkworks Summer Schools, tutoring at Newcastle University, working as a music teacher in a secondary school, and leading other youth and adult folk music learning projects across the north of England.