On Song

Simon Beston is big on opportunity.

 

When we meet, he is getting to grips with being back in the UK, having spent a decade teaching at the British School in Tokyo. But it’s clear that LWC’s new Director of Music is a man who spots possibility in almost every situation.

 

“It’s good to be an outsider sometimes,” he reflects when asked about his time spent in the Far East. “When I arrived in Japan, everything was so different compared to my previous school (in Streatham, South London). But I’ve learned to observe and not assume that what will work in one setting will work in another.” As he begins his new role in the 1200, he’s keen to apply the same logic here.

 

“It’s clear that Aaron (Parker, previous Director of Music) has put in an enormous amount of work to build something fantastic at LWC,” he continues. “I’m really looking forward to seeing what that looks like in practice, meeting the musicians here and achieving something great together.”

 

Mr Beston has made the 6,000-mile journey from Tokyo to North East Hampshire to continue teaching a subject that he loves.

 

“Music is about creating sounds that make people feel things,” he beams. “We invest a lot of time and effort into making these sounds as perfect as possible and it’s a unique thing that humans have been doing for thousands of years.”

 

Simon’s own journey into music-making began in Crystal Palace, South London. “We were a musical family,” he admits. “My dad was always listening to opera and classical music, my mum was listening to Irish music, as I come from an Irish family. I have three older brothers who would play or listen to anything from Chopin, techno and dance to The Beatles and Pink Floyd. It was quite a rich musical tapestry, which I think has informed my view of music and how you can learn it. I was always experimenting with things and learned to play the piano by ear. It helped me to discover all of the different opportunities and ways in which you can become a musician.”

 

And there’s that word again.

   

“Performing can just feel like the best thing in the world and I don’t think that anything can ever get in the way of that. It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve lived or how many times it’s happened. They are really special moments”

-Simon Beston, LWC Director of Music

   

Having truly fallen in love with music in primary school when he heard the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album by The Beatles, it wasn’t until secondary school that Simon found his real passion within the discipline.

 

“I heard our school choir singing and immediately wanted to join,” he grins. “I was in Year 10 and so this was quite late compared to when many in the singing world first started. My voice had already broken! But I had a great singing teacher in Ruth Holton, who performs with the world-renowned Monteverdi Choir. She taught me the value of sticking at something and what can be achieved with hard work. I think that singing appealed because there was just so much opportunity to do it.

 

“I joined my local church, St Philip’s in Norbury and they had this terrific boys’ choir called Libera. They were singing to a very high standard and taught me a lot about professionalism. I had a couple of very good mentors who pushed me to do things that I may not otherwise have done. I ended up deputising as a lay clerk (professional singer) at The Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace when I was 17, surrounded by those who had been doing it for decades!”

 

Having graduated from the University of Oxford, Simon stayed for an extra year to become a lay clerk at New College before returning to London to pursue a broader career as a freelance musician.

 

“I began doing some teaching at a school and gradually, the balance shifted from doing more performing and less teaching, to more teaching and less performing. I realised how much I enjoyed teaching music and the rest is history.”  

   

And so began Simon’s 16-year teaching career, which has taken him from the streets of Streatham to the skyscrapers of Tokyo, where he would become Director of Music at the British School. “As a newcomer to the country with a poor grasp of Japanese, I wanted to do more performing alongside my work,” he offers. “But there weren’t many opportunities. A lot of the smaller international schools didn’t have orchestras and choirs that you could join, so I thought there might be a lot of children in a similar situation to me too, looking for somewhere to perform.”

 

Out of (yet another) opportunity, Simon created the Tokyo International Music School in 2022. “They now have a 60-strong community choir and it’s taken on a life of its own,” he admits. He also oversaw some exciting projects for students at the British School in Tokyo during his tenure there.

 

“We had a choir singing as part of the 2019 Rugby World Cup Opening Ceremony,” he reveals. “We also appeared alongside the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra for the 35^th anniversary of the school. Around 250 students performed in front of an audience of 2,000, some of whom would never have seen an orchestra performing live.”

 

Performance remains an integral part of Simon’s own life. He continues to enjoy deputising as a lay clerk when his schedule permits and is a talented pianist, saxophonist and bass guitarist.

 

“Performing can just feel like the best thing in the world and I don’t think that anything can ever get in the way of that,” he admits. “It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve lived or how many times it’s happened. They are really special moments.

 

“But we’re not trying to create a stream of professional musicians or people who study music at university. If they do, that’s great, but it’s not how I measure the success of music within a school. If a young person leaves the College and continues to do something musical throughout their life, then that’s a success. For those who take music into adulthood, they see the real benefits. You can bond with others, focus on striving for the mastery of it and appreciate what beauty is because you’re trying to create it with every note that you sing or play.”

 

The opportunities are endless.