Category Archive: Composer

Following on from previous blogposts on The Greatest Refreshment, Advent Calendar, and Three Heine Love Songs, I thought I would write a little about another piece of mine, The World to me. Its text is the poem ‘World’ from Carol Ann Duffy‘s 2005 book Rapture, words I had actually wanted to set for a long […]

I wrote these back in 2009, when they were premiered by the Damon Singers. The text for the third was one of the readings at our wedding (my wife and I both studied modern languages at university).  Having discovered it, I read more of Heine’s work, and found two more poems of his I wanted […]

This post is part of a series on some of my compositions. You can read the first one here. I first came across Rowan Williams‘ poem ‘Advent Calendar’ in 2006, when my wife and I were expecting our first child, and I immediately knew I wanted to set it.  My idea in the setting was […]

Having written a couple of blogposts recently on some translations of mine, I thought I would turn to my compositions, if nothing else than to document a little about them. To being at the beginning: my first choral work, The Greatest Refreshment, dates from 2005. It is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, who […]

As today (5 December) is Christina Rossetti‘s birthday, we thought it apt to feature her in our Christmas carol countdown. ‘In the bleak mid-winter’ was based on the hauntingly beautiful poem by Rossetti, which was first published (without music) in the January 1872 issue of Scribner’s Monthly. Its first appearance with music was in 1906, […]