Richard

I am a Cambridge University graduate, and now work as a freelance professional opera singer, currently in my second year of Masters study at the Royal College of Music. At Cambridge, I graduated with a 'starred' first with distinction, coming 11th out of 180 students in my year across the university, whilst also singing 7 services a week as a choral scholar in the choir of St John's College. My dissertation focused on consonant perception at different pitches in solo soprano operatic singing, combining phonetics, language and music with statistical analyses, and I am hoping to do some more research on the subject. I lived in Italy for a year working as a choir director, and as such I have C2 level Italian, as well as C1 level French. In addition to teaching languages and music, I can also teach maths up to GCSE level, having two A*s in Maths and Further Maths A-level. As a musician, I am also a pianist and oboist, and have a solid grasp of music theory. Outside of musical and academic pursuits, I am a keen runner, and love to travel around the world.

Tutoring Experience

I have recently begun teaching privately as a singing and piano teacher. I have also taught music theory lessons in Italy, in both Italian and English depending on the need of the student. I also have a lot of experience working with young people - in 2016 I volunteered at a local primary school, where I not only helped the children with their curriculum activities, but also got them to work with music, where we wrote short songs based on what they had been learning in class. I was fortunate enough to help lead some workshops with the Voices Foundation in 2021, going into local primary schools and introducing singing workshops to children who otherwise have no access to music. I also am about to start working with the choir at All Saints Church, Orpington, including training their junior choir.

Tutoring Approach

My approach is always to ask the student questions. This allows me to immediately focus in on elements the students struggle with - the very first session will always be for me to assess what I need to plan for the next lessons. There is no point in just teaching the same thing to each student - in languages for example, if one student struggles with the use of the subjunctive, I'll make sure that the following lesson is purely devoted to that, otherwise the tutoring session becomes a waste of time. I will also encourage reading around the subject, particularly with languages. I studied Italian from scratch at university and was never taught any vocab - all I did was read newspapers, watch television in Italian etc. Although there was a lot I didn't understand at first, it massively helped to pick up idioms and understand how to speak more fluently in the language, and I would encourage my students to do the same.