Nigel Lilley - Training to be a Musical Director

I did a rather straight music degree at King' s College London. Which had lots of academic stuff, so there was lots of research and lots of pure analysis, mainly classical works. And then after that I was lucky enough, they' d set up a Musical Directors' course at the Royal Academy of Music and I was the first person to do that. It was fantastic as it combined vocal technique which is obviously very important, straight conducting with a baton as well as keys MDing. And just spending a year learning repertoire really. If you have a very broad repertoire that you are familiar with and you can draw on later on it' s sort of invaluable really. I got to know a lot of the Rodgers and Hammerstein scores and I used to play a lot of Gershwin. That' s a kind of good bedrock, it' s a bit like knowing all your Shakespeares really. For musical theatre it' s your Rodgers and Hammerstein and all those 30s and 40s shows which are the basis of what we do. So I think that was really invaluable.