Henri Oguike Dance Company and Shostakovich

I'm in Ilfracombe, North Devon, to play Shostakovich's 9th Quartet with the Henri Oguike Dance Company (HODC). It's weird being in a seaside tourist town out of season. All the tourist facilities are open and in place - fish and chip shops, amusement arcades, tearooms etc. - but everything is nearly completely empty, even in the middle of the day. It must be strange to live in a ghost town, even more so to spend your childhood in one. It really brings home how crucial an arts venue is to places like this. Just because you can't precisely measure the effect that the arts have on a community doesn't mean that they aren't an essential part of what gives that community balance and contributes to the wellbeing of those who live there.

**

I used to play Shostakovich's 9th quartet a lot with HODC when I was at the Academy. But it's been two years since I last did so. It's so great to come back to a piece of music after such a long period of time and find it fairly intact; muscle memories are still vaguely there, and cleaning up the piece and making it ready for performance is a fairly swift process.

What's interesting is seeing how the piece you're playing is improved by everything you've learnt in the interim period. Improved rehearsal technique, improved technical accuracy, increasingly wide intuitive musical knowledge and countless other small general improvements all add up to make a marked difference in the effectiveness with which you approach a piece of music... even if you've barely thought about that music for such a length of time.

Of course, with all these improvements comes an ever-heightening sense of awareness, which of course is crucial. But it does mean that the better you become, the more you realise there is to improve....