In mid-March, students from every year group in the school will be competing in the Music Department for the coveted title of Queenswood Musician of the Year.

The preliminary rounds takeplace during the day on 15 March and the Final will be on Thursday 17 March
at 7.00pm in Ernest Read Hall.  

For the first time, there will be three categories:

• Lower School
  (Years 7 – 8)
• Middle School (Years 9 – 10)
• Upper School (Years 11 – 13)  

The finalists will be chosen from all categories to perform on 17 March. There will be prize winners from each category and an overall winner of the competition.

Adjudicator – Douglas Wilkie

We are very pleased to announce that our adjudicator is Douglas Wilkie BMus, LRAM (Composition), ARCM (Pianoforte), LTCL (Trombone).

Douglas studied trombone, piano and composition at
Trinity College and the Royal Academy of Music before spending a period
freelancing with various London orchestras, including the BBC Symphony, Royal
Philharmonic and the Philharmonia.  He
subsequently took up a teaching position in Cambridge, where he created a
particularly successful Music Department and found himself coaching the Cambridgeshire
Youth Orchestra – considered to be amongst the best youth orchestras of the
time.

In 1965, he moved to Nottingham to take up the post of Senior
Lecturer at Clarendon College. His subsequent list of pupils reads like a
‘Who’s Who’s’ of British orchestral musicians, Instrumentalists and singers including
the acclaimed mezzo-soprano, Sarah Connolly, who in a Times article named Douglas
Wilkie as her most influential teacher. At Clarendon, he immersed himself in
academia – concentrated on composition, orchestration and analysis whilst pursuing
an active freelance career, performing regularly with the East of England Orchestra
– founded by one of his previous students, East Midlands Music Theatre and the
Birmingham-based Orchestra da Camera. As light relief he also performed with
the Melachrino Orchestra and the BBC Midland Light Radio Orchestra.  Since his retirement from full-time lecturing
in 1994, he has maintained his links with local orchestras and Big Bands and
continues his connections with youth music by coaching the Nottingham Youth
Orchestra.

Douglas
Wilkie directs his own professional ensemble ‘ProMusica Brass’, formed in the
1980s from a nucleus of his professional ex-students, drawn from their
orchestral work to perform mainly music for Organ & Brass, collaborating
with many distinguished organists such as Peter Hurford, Jonathan Rees-Williams
and John Keys. The ensemble has given many concerts including performances in
the Royal Cathedral, Versailles and Thomaskirche – Leipzig,
once the church of JS Bach.