Commercial Pilot on a Career Break teaching Piano in South East London

Experience

I am currently working as a Commercial Pilot, was previously based out of Edinburgh Airport and have now moved to London to seek other aviation opportunities. Whilst I am looking for these new flying opportunities, I want to use my spare time to continue teaching piano (which I had previous done around my flying schedule in Edinburgh).

I started playing the Piano when I was 4 years old and would play regularly for my church. I attended CYM in Waterloo (London) on Saturday mornings from ages 11-18 where I achieved my Grade 8 followed by ATCL in Piano performance, as well as my Grade 8 in Trombone. After college, I decided to pursue a different career instead of music. This was venue management, namely live music venues.

During this time, I would still practice the Piano when I could but would play on a leisurely basis. I also played the organ for my churches (in London and Leeds) on a regular basis. I have been lucky enough to play on some larger organs as a one-off (Cantebury Cathedral, Southwark Cathedral). This also included playing for and directing 2 adult choirs and 1 youth choir.

Since I started my pilot training in March 2012, I was unable to commit to a regular 'schedule' for any church. So I have gotten used to last minute requests to stand in when a regular organist goes sick or on holiday. These involved churches in London, Bournemouth,Exeter and Edinburgh. My organ repertoire suits perfectly for services that require well known hymns and songs (in the case of a solo vocalist being found). For weddings in particular, most traditional wedding songs have been inprinted in to my memory as I have been playing for wedding and funerals now for over 15 years (albeit on an ad-hoc basis).

Before 2018, all of my teaching experience had involved me teaching family, friends and friends of friends for either no fee or donation. They have all advised me to go in to professional teaching, but with an alternate career and previous jobs I found very little time to do so.

I have seen that my skill set changed dramatically when I was asked to create from scratch both an adult choir and a youth choir, each containing mixed abilities ranging from complete novices who had a good voice but could not read music, to professionally trained vocalists. I was forced to create a situation in which things would just work! Whilst it was out of my usual comfort zone I really did enjoy this and the end product was ultimately rewarding. This is in a large part because I don't like to sing myself, and creating a choir with varying abilities and teaching them to sing Brahms in 4 parts I felt was a huge accomplishment.

Since teaching professionally in Edinburgh, I gained a variety of students varying in age and skill level. I have now returned to London whilst on a career break from flying to concentrate on my other passion in life. Music.