Congratulations to Mrs Nathan who has completed an extraordinary musical challenge this week in aid of the music therapy charity Nordoff and Robbins. During 2024 Mrs Nathan has taken ten Grade 5 ABRSM music exams, nearly all in instruments she has been playing for less than a year:

  • Harpsichord (April 2024)
  • Treble Recorder (April 2024)
  • Bassoon (July 2024)
  • Combined Percussion – Snare Drum, Timpani & Xylophone (July 2024)
  • Organ (July 2024)
  • Classical Guitar (December 2024)
  • Double Bass (December 2024)
  • Tenor Saxophone (December 2024)
  • Trombone (December 2024)
  • Voice (December 2024)

As she has already been singing for quite a while, Mrs Nathan decided to up the ante and sit Grade 8 Voice too! While the results are still pending for the December exams Mrs Nathan is crossing her fingers that she keeps up her run of successes. She passed all the exams in the Spring and Summer with at least 130 out of 150!

Mrs Nathan deliberately chose to learn a range of instruments from all the different ‘families’: Wind, Brass, Percussion, Keyboard and Strings, and she focussed on less popular instruments to highlight their appeal. She’s even managed to recruit several new pupils along the way! For any pupils interested in learning an instrument at King’s please do get in touch with the Music Department at music@kings-rochester.co.uk.

There were plenty of different challenges involved in the project, “Harpsichord was probably the easiest exam as I already played the piano, but every instrument had its own quirks. You would have thought playing the bassoon would have been easy for me as an oboist but was actually very different. Double bass was definitely the most fun and I’ll continue to enjoy playing it. I’ll be quite glad to hand back the trombone though – I don’t think I’m a natural brass player!”

If you would like to donate to the Nordoff and Robbins charity, you can do so via Just Giving.

Related Posts

  • Pupils in the Removes, along with Sixth Form A-Level historians, attended a workshop with Holocaust Educational Trust educators as part of an innovative programme called “Testimony 360”. The project involves a digital programme, combining pre-recorded eyewitness testimony with virtual site-based learning. Using Virtual Reality headsets, pupils were able to ask questions of a Holocaust [...]

  • Professor Gurprit Lall, Old Roffensian, returned to King's to deliver the latest in the Zetountes-Barton Society Lectures, speaking on his research on Circadian Neurobiology. Complimenting the school on its new science facilities, Professor Lall reminisced on his time at King's, where his love of science was first developed. The assembled audience of Academic Scholars, [...]

  • We marked National Poetry Day with a chapel service written and delivered by the Lower Sixth A Level Literature group. The theme of this year’s NPD was ‘play’ and our pupils reflected on the importance of play in our lives by performing a range of poetry exploring this. We began with poems about the value [...]