Christina McMaster
Artists Relations and Promo Manager at Warner Classics
Biography
Christina McMaster is a pianist, collaborator and educator on a mission to bring the wellbeing and healing benefits of music to all. She has initiated and curated multiple entrepreneurial arts projects and in 2017 was awarded an Associate from the Royal Academy of Music for her contribution to the music industry.
She has worked with rappers, scientists, theatre directors etc. Most recently she has collaborated with folk legend Peggy Seeger and on music and words collaboration for a climate change and sustainability film by Mary McCartney. Christina has performed at leading venues/festivals including Cheltenham, Aldeburgh, QEH and worked with composers such as Harrison Birtwistle, Tansy Davies, Stephen Montague, Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Freya Waley-Cohen etc. She has appeared regularly on Radio 3 and Classic FM.
In 2017-18 she was a Visiting Associate at Kings College London Institute of Psychology, psychiatry and Neuroscience, testing the benefits of music and psychedelic visuals in a lying down concert. This evolved into Lie down and Listen; launched in 2018 - it is an ongoing lying down concert series to listen deeply to music following meditation/restorative yoga in silence. During lockdown Christina ran live Lie down and Listen sessions alongside expert meditators Zephyr Wildman, Will Williams of Beeja Meditation for world meditation and as part of Fearne Cottons Happy Place Festival.
In 2016 Christina was selected as a young artist in residence at St John’s Smith square, and from 2013- 17 she curated programmes of multimedia, dance and music events for The Royal Academy of Music annual Piano Festival. She has been a mentor for the WOW festival and given talks on music at Kings Place and leading Universities worldwide. She is also Artists Relations and Promo Manager at Warner Classics.
Events
Une semaine d'échanges et de dialogues entre des lauréats du Concours de Genève et des professionnels du monde de la musique et de la scène, entre cas pratiques, exemples personnalisés et ouverture sur les aspects "indirectement artistiques" de la vie du jeune musicien.
This year’s Prizewinners’ Workshop 2020 was supposed to be held during the first week of May and bring together half a dozen recent prizewinners of the Geneva Competition (2019) along with a few students from the HEM, who are completing a Masters in specialized music performance as soloist. Due to the sanitary crisis caused by the Covid-19, this workshop could unfortunately not take place in person, despite it having been postponed to the month of September. The Geneva Competition therefore decided to innovate by offering a Prizewinners’ e-Workshop, which will be held online during more than a month.
The content of this e-Workshop has been adapted to fit the present circumstances and conditions of implementation, whilst maintaining its initial objectives and values. Privileging a method of personal coaching, it will focus on two main themes: career management and digital & audio-visual training.
This alternative experience will take place over a period of more than a month and will include personal evaluations, collective broadcasts, one-on-one interviews and times of independent work. During the last day of the Workshop, participants will be given the opportunity to meet up (hopeful in person) to share their experience with others and present their work. This final meeting will be a great way to reinforce the collective nature of the project, whereas the eWorkshop will be essentially run at a distance.
Participants in the eWorkshop will be given the mission of completing two distinct and complementary personal projects: the first one on the theme of career management and the second one resulting in the production of a short video. By addressing issues that are crucial to the development of a young musicians’ career, these projects follow the objectives fixed by the Geneva Competition’s Prizewinners Workshop since its creation in 2017.
The e-Workshop is managed by the Geneva Competition and its line producer ProMusica Concert Agency. Both of these entities provide recognized professional competences to participants (artistic management, financial management, production, communication, public relations, etc.), as well as an experience of several years in event organization.
The permanent team will be reinforced by specialists in multimedia, as well as a journalist- presenter and a technical manager. These personalities will form the reference team in charge of organizing and animating the eWorkshop.
This 4th edition of the Prizewinners workshop of the Concours Genève is supported by the Art Mentor Foundation (Luzern, Switzerland).