Category Archive: Composer

Although I had dabbled a bit before—I remember showing some things I had written to Lionel Dakers on an RSCM singing course once (I must have been about eleven), and I wrote a couple of psalm chants in my late teens—my composing only really got going in 2006, when I was in my early thirties […]

Happy New Year. Things have been quiet on the blog for a while, so I thought I’d post a little update. December was quite busy, catching up with cataloguing and working on some new compositions. A new list of recent acquisitions should be out later in the month, and I am also pleased to report […]

This is another post (one of a series) about pieces of music I have written. This week it’s the turn of The Little One, which I wrote back in 2009 for the Senior Choir of Dr Challoner’s High School, just up the road in Little Chalfont. It came about after the Choir of St John’s […]

Attentive readers will have noticed that there was no blogpost last week. I was in York, teaching at YABS, the York Antiquarian Book Seminar: three-and-a-half days talking about books and bookselling to some wonderfully engaged students keen to know more. It’s always an enjoyable few days, and this year particularly so as going away to […]

I’ve blogged before about translating, and then setting, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. As yesterday was International Translation Day, I thought this week I’d write about another piece of mine, At Cana. This was actually what first brought me to Rilke, when, in 2019, I was looking for a text to set for a […]

Last year, I blogged about my Three Heine Love Songs. I wrote them back in 2009, so it was very nice to hear them again recently, in a virtual performance by the University of St Andrews Chamber Choir on their Facebook page. Amazingly, the same week as the St Andrews video went online, I received […]