RACHEL HAYWARD – 35 years of Pan

An exclusive with educator, performing artist and arranger


Rachel Hayward
Rachel Hayward

UK -  Rachel started playing pan in 1985 with her school steel band — The Radcliffe Rollers — where she was encouraged and inspired by her teachers Richard Murphy and Neil Davison and tuner Michael "Natsy" Contant to create her first arrangements and compositions for solo and ensemble steel pans.

After leaving school she continued her classical conservatoire training at the Guildhall School of Music And Drama and she holds an MA (music performance) from the City University, London. Since 1996 she has focused exclusively on pan. She won the UK Soloists Competition in 1989, and has performed throughout Europe and the Caribbean, most notably in Trinidad (the birthplace of steelpan) when she was the first, and to date, only, Briton to compete in the World Steelband Soloists Competition 1996 and was placed fourth overall. She has had several pieces composed for her including the opera Inkle and Yarico by Roxanna Panufnik, which premiered in Barbados in 1997, and most recently The Birmingham Spirituals by Patrick Larley and premiered in 2014.

She has also performed with such prestigious ensembles as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta. Media credits include Meridian TV's ‘Three Minutes’, ‘Woman's Hour’ and Dave Gorman’s ‘Genius’ (BBC Radio 4). She was a featured soloist on the contemporary music series ‘Hear And Now’ and ‘Music Matters’ (Radio 3). She has played with top British and Trinidadian steel orchestras, including Starlift, Hummingbirds Pan Groove, Eclipse and Pantasia in the London and Trinidad Panoramas, and she was the first European pannist to arrange for and conduct a top Trinidadian steel orchestra - The Skiffle Bunch - in their ‘Feeling the Classics’ concert series. She arranged for Eclipse Steel Orchestra (London); they played her arrangement of excerpts from Khatchaturian's Masquerade Suite at the First European Steelband Festival in Paris 2000. She has performed at the 606 Club as a guest artist with the Russell Henderson Trio and was invited to participate in the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony with Nostalgia Steel Band.

She is a published author and her arrangements for steelpans are available from Panyard Inc, Ohio, and Piper Publications and also from her own website. Her steel bands regularly win awards in both national and regional competitions, and perform at such prestigious venues as the Royal Albert Hall, and The Royal Festival Hall, London, England. She has run projects for TAPS (Traditional Arts Projects) and Steel Bands North, and advised the Society for the Promotion of New Music, Associated Board of The Royal Schools of Music, and the Guildhall School of Music on their steel pan projects and was guest pan tutor at the Royal College of Music.

Steel pan soloist Rachel Hayward talks in this (slightly oddly edited) video about her career playing steel pans, broadcast on Meridian Television -2001

She currently runs Euphoria Steel Band in Brighton — one of only three pan-round-neck steel bands in the UK — and teaches the Reigate Pilgrim Steel Bands, and at The Hawthorns School, Bletchingley. 2015 will see her debut as an arranger for the Notting Hill Carnival with Pan Nectar Steel Band. In July 2015 she will graduate from City University, London which has recently approved her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Yellow Bird’ and Pan: the Transmission, Circulation and Re-creation of a Caribbean Song and will present a paper based on her research at the International Pan Conference (Trinidad and Tobago) in August. She is also preparing material for her new album: her current one — Priestess of Pan — is still available from her website.

**read more Rachel Hayward – A British Pan Woman

 

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