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ABOUT Andrew

Andrew Hodges is the force behind "Mastering Chaos: The Musician's Way.

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Andrew is a business consultant and an accomplished musician and teacher, Andrew's worldwide business experience includes work in the UK, Europe, the USA & China. He has also worked extensively in the field of music improvisation and how they might be applied in non-musical settings.

Most people know of Andrew as a violinist but over the years he has spent a considerable amount of time working with the business community helping with the development of business teams.  From time to time, in the middle of business activities, he has found himself borrowing from his musical experience as a potential method of progressing a business problem. In the process of working with people, odd parallels have emerged between the way music works and the way we might adopt a musical approach to a non-musical problem.

Andrew has been strongly associated with music improvisation since the very beginning of his music career.  As a London secondary school teacher back in the 1970s he and his colleagues implemented a style of classroom music tuition which was, at the time, considered to be groundbreaking. 

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This style was eventually to become a well-established approach in music education. It has now been employed in a variety of different settings including universities, social care, health & in one of Andrew's other areas of expertise, business coaching, leadership skills & team development.

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Andrew is one of the most experienced experts in employing the musical methodology for personal development. It is a set of musical tools which can be enjoyed by anyone, even those who might not consider themselves musical. This approach to music making has many applications in the development of musicians but it also has a surprising number of applications outside of the field of music, one of which is team leadership.

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The juxtaposition of these aspects of human endeavour might to some seem awkward. A cursory glance would suggest that the world of the office doesn't seem to uphold many of the values associated with those of the musical world except perhaps competitiveness and elitism. Some people might consider them to be incongruent or even simply incompatible.

 

And yet, and yet...

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"There is so much reward if you are prepared to let go of the well-trodden path. Experimenting, pushing the boundaries and ultimately freeing up your creativity and personal effectiveness awaits you just beyond the limited horizon of the rules of the system. It is your access to creativity, play and ultimately the realisation of the full expression of your own truth."

Andrew has been described as having all the characteristics of a polymath; someone whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas.  His two principal passions are classical music and new developments in the field of sound & music.  However his other fields of knowledge include the philosophy of yoga, neuro-linguistic programming, web-based marketing, business management, training, personal & team development, rather poor French and developing applications in improvisation theory.

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Andrew's original training was as a violinist at the Royal Academy of Music.  His musical career has been wide and various including having been Head of Music in a central London school. He was one of the first music teachers to adopt an approach to music tuition employing the medium of music improvisation. The teenagers in his schools found the approach refreshing and spoke to them in their 'language'. Other educators subsequently worked with the methodology to the point where it became established.  One such avenue was the Lifemusic method. In 1985 he took the radical step of leaving teaching and joining Rank Xerox (UK) Ltd in a sales role as a global account manager. This was followed by a number of years as a consultant trainer with experience extending across the UK, Europe and eventually to China. 

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Throughout the whole of this 'non-musical' time he never forgot his musical roots. For over twenty years he was heavily involved in the ongoing development of the Lifemusic Method, particularly in applications outside the boundaries of music. From around 2005 onwards he restarted his violin tuition in the Cotswold area. He is now also noted for his arrangements of contemporary music and the creation of music videos for string quartets & string orchestras.

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Based now in Gloucestershire (UK) his time is spent across a number of roles:

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