Anneke’s Music Story
Anneke’s parents moved around quite a bit when she was a child, and she spent much of her earlier years in Australia. Her initial musical training started around the age of 5 started in Australia at a local Kodály method children’s class. These classes focuses on the expressive and creative skills of musicianship (rather than the theory or instrument skill) and was created by the Hungarian composer, Zoltán Kodály. She also played recorder at school.
When her parents moved back to the UK Anneke started piano lessons and she got selected at school to start the tenor horn at around the age of nine. Her form tutor was also the head of music and the fact she had already studied piano and music from an early age put her in a good position to be selected to take up brass lessons. Anneke grew up in Birmingham which at the time had a great local music service and played in lots of bands and orchestras while she was at school. While she was at an academic school, pursuing music as a career was not particularly encouraged, but despite this she persevered!
She went from school to the Royal Academy of Music for her undergraduate studies, to study with Pip Eastop and Andrew Clark and then to France and the Netherlands for post graduate studies where she focused on aspects of period horn playing. Since then, she has mainly been performing or conducting masterclasses.
She is principal horn of internationally renowned period instrument ensembles including Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestra Révolutionnaire et Romantique. The English Baroque Soloists, Raphaël Pichon’s ensemble Pygmalion, Harry Christopher’s The Orchestra of the Sixteen, the Irish Baroque Orchestra, and the Dunedin Consort.
Anneke continues to be a key figure in research and performance for the historical horn. Through her career she has won several awards. In 2010 she received a Gerard Finzi Travel Scholarship to undertake research in Paris in preparation for her ground breaking recording of the Jacques-François Gallay Douze Grands Caprices on natural horn, and in 2018 Anneke was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music. In 2020 she was awarded the International Horn Society Punto Award in recognition of her distinguished contribution and service to the art of horn playing.
Anneke teaches at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Dance and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, as well as individuals online across the world. She is a contributor to Brass for Beginners, the first brass program geared specifically for the primary school classroom.