Category Archive: Uncategorised

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 […]

I am currently cataloguing some new material in preparation for the Boston Virtual Book Fair next week. Here’s one such item: ‘This elaborate house-blessing [which measures 412 × 325 mm], issued in the 1820s by Johann Ritter and Company of Reading … provides a unique poetic blessing rather than the common prose versions and the shorter […]

I thought I’d write about something slightly different today. It’s not about books, it’s not about translation, it’s not about music, but something else which is important to me, and something which I have done all my adult life: giving blood. I’ve been a regular blood donor ever since I went to university, so over […]

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 […]

This collection, The Catch Club (1733), brings together songs by a range of English Baroque composers—the vast majority by Henry Purcell (‘with over fifty pieces, almost his entire printed output in the genre’, Newman; no other composer wrote half as many), but Henry Aldrich, John Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, John Eccles, Henry Hall, Michael Wise etc. […]