Contributor Profile: Lucy Jeffery

Lucy was born in 1991, in Swansea. With a musical family, her earliest memories of music are of being with her sherry-sipping, cigarette-smoking, big-toe tapping grandmother, whose hazy-blue living room was more like a downtown Jazz-club than a prim ‘front-room’. At home, the music was eclectic; ranging from Gregorian chant, the Russian five, Spanish guitar, oriental Oud, Swing Standards, and a wild collection of African bands. Sitting cross-legged in front of the CD player, with the music tiptoeing louder and louder, Lucy began her musical journey. However, it wasn’t until hearing Johann Ludwig Krebs on Radio 3, when sitting in the car (waiting for her parents to finish shopping at Tesco), that Lucy immersed herself, first into Baroque music, then into all types of classical music.

Lucy attended St Michael’s School in Llanelli, where she played cello and double-bass in the school orchestra and chamber ensemble and begun cello lessons with Elizabeth Hayes (granddaughter of Walter de la Mare) in Laraghne, home of Dylan Thomas. After reading about Pablo Casals’s practicing routine, Lucy also begins each day with a Bach Suite (sounding rather less like Casals than she would hope!). Later, she studied English Literature at Swansea University with Glyn Pursglove, finishing her MA in 2013. After living in Western Greece for 6 months teaching English, Lucy returned to Swansea and surprised that the university has continued to put up with her tangential essays, which include just as much art and music as literature, she is currently working on a PhD in Swansea under the supervision of Dr. Richard Robinson.

Aside from studying, Lucy enjoys reviewing poetry for Acumen and is delighted to be a trustee for Crwth, an organisation sponsoring chamber music concerts in and around Swansea. Having recently travelled to Tuscany, Lucy is now a self-confessed Italophile (better late than never). In her spare time she enjoys cycling, visiting galleries (especially those which contain a good Renaissance or Vorticist collection), reading about Orientalism, and travelling to visit her rather dispersed family. If she must choose a desert island disc, it would still be the Complete Piano Works of Clara Schumann, performed by Josef de Beenhouwer. Her luxury item would be her cello.