I have a varied career freelancing as a flautist with orchestras and ensembles and teaching students both privately and in schools. One day I can be teaching a student their first note on the flute and the next I can be playing a Mahler symphony with a 120-piece orchestra or working on a new commission for a small chamber ensemble. No two days are the same and it’s this diversity and unpredictability that I enjoy the most. One of the most fulfilling parts of my work is seeing a student excited to learn a piece of music and helping them to explore it with creativity and confidence.

I remember watching a performance of Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune at the BBC Proms when I was about 10. This is my earliest memory of seeing an orchestra play and I couldn’t believe the sounds and colours that an orchestra could create. Up until this point I had been fairly content playing 2nd triangle in our school band. I listened to recordings of the piece on repeat for weeks on end and predictably, that flute solo was the catalyst for my determination to learn the flute.

One thing I’ve learnt over the past year is just how much I love my job and that it really is the biggest influence on my life. I currently hold a full-time position as a Cellist with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra touring large swathes of the South West of England and beyond. It’s a huge area to cover, the largest remit of any UK based orchestra, and in normal times involves a lot of travel. We cover vast amounts of repertoire which was a steep learning curve when I first joined.

Whilst a job like this offers security, one benefit to freelancing is the amount of variation you get in your day to day life, and it’s wonderful that I can continue working with groups like the Shadwell Ensemble and benefit a little from that variation. It’s a really different working environment, potentially rehearsing more in depth, and incredibly sociable as it may have been some time since you last saw one another.

I was incredibly lucky to have many opportunities to perform whilst growing up, whether that was with Junior Guildhall or on a music course such as Pro Corda, so I have many musical memories to choose from. I think probably the most exciting was going on tour with a youth string orchestra to San Francisco when I was 16. We worked alongside talented American musicians, performing several concerts in the cathedral (one during an earthquake!), and I think it was at that time I really knew it was something I wanted to continue doing.

My 'instrument' is pretty much anything you hit - it's a family of instruments rather than one thing. It's all about finding the right sound (which triangle? which drum? etc) for the music, so I often spend quite a lot of my time listening to the pieces and studying the scores to make sure I'm understanding my role. Percussion can also be quite exposed - you want to make sure you know the music well because you don't want to play a cymbal crash (or play a timpani note, or hit an oil drum, or throw a plate in a bin) in the wrong place.

That's a tough one! I remember playing timps for my local youth orchestra for the first rehearsal of Brahms violin concerto in my teens, when I was listening exclusively either to big explosive Mahler and Shostakovich symphonies or the Cure, thinking the Brahms was going to be really boring. The conductor, Mark Forkgen, started pointing out striking details in the score and he was just beaming with excitement about the music, and I started thinking maybe there was something in it. Gradually my ears opened to the exciting and nourishing possibilities of subtler aspects of music than the kind of bold contrasts that up to that point had been all I could really get excited about; that moment was a bit of a starting point for that process.

Working as a pianist requires me to be versatile. Piano is in theory a pretty simple instrument - press a button and it makes a sound, press it harder and the sound is louder. But there are a lot of buttons and they're not always the correct ones to press, and the strength of your push is surprisingly nuanced to make up for us not having to worry about things like tuning. Furthermore, the piano is a harmonic instrument and we pianists get to explore a 3-dimensional world of colourful chords, the likes of which regularly make violinists cry for their ability to only handle one note at a time (mostly). The point is, the piano has the flexibility to fill many different roles. It's a harmonic extension of whatever instrument it's accompanying, it's an orchestra when repetiteuring for a Shadwell opera project, it's a singer when performing a Mozart piano concerto, and a percussion instrument when playing Ligeti.

Playing in Hans Abrahamsen's Märchenbilder and Boulez' Flute Sonatine as a fresh-faced first year were probably quite revelatory moments as they set off my serious interest in modern and new music. I think however my fanatical love of Prokofiev since a young age has been most influential in my musical taste, and I owe that one to my dad.

Musical memory: When i was about 5, my mum told me an invented story about a little crab who lived in Fingals cave and had to battle against the tides endlessly while we listened to the piece by Mendelssohn - it was the first time in my life that i realised that music could tell stories, and that has shaped me as a musician.