On 8 November 2019, my composition students presented a workshop concert at Metronomen with English horn player Caroline Savickienė.
The point of the project was simple: young composers should meet the English horn early, not only as an orchestration-table entry, but as a real instrument in the room. The English horn is close to the oboe, but it is not just a lower oboe. It has its own weight, distance and colour.
The programme included new student works for English horn solo, English horn and piano, and English horn with electronics. The students worked with very different ideas: theatre, electronics, mythological material, twelve-tone technique, and even a response to Stockhausen’s Studie I.
For me, this kind of workshop is basic composition teaching in the best sense. A young composer learns an instrument by writing for it, hearing it, correcting assumptions, and discovering what the player actually makes possible.