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In Commendation of Music
Somehow, I neglected to blog about this at the time… last year I wanted to make a birthday present for Stella, who keeps everything ticking over smoothly at Quire. So of course I wrote a piece of...
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Ruht wohl
Last night I went to hear Bach’s St John Passion at St Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral is not the best acoustic environment for it, to be honest: there’s a very long echo and the sound just gets...
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In the great congregation I will praise…
Though my diocesan cathedral in Chelmsford is a bit of a trek for me, I’m privileged in London to be within easy travel distance of both St Paul’s Cathedral and Southwark Cathedral.Yesterday, partly...
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A creative response to copyrighted lyrics…
Eric Whitacre wrote this music to fit the poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. Rather stupidly, Robert Frost’s estate told him that he couldn’t use it until it becomes public...
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St Paul’s Evensong at OccupyLSX
I didn’t think, when I got up this morning, that I would somehow wind up leading a BCP Evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral has had Occupy LSX, a protest camp, on their doorstep for the past...
View ArticleTransfiguration
One of the challenges of my job is finding music appropriate for our small choir at St Andrew’s. The Anglican choral tradition is wonderful and beautiful and has a tendency to assume you have altos,...
View ArticleGood problems
It’s getting near the time for the annual Carol Service at St Andrew’s Leytonstone, and rehearsals started last night. For the Carol Service we have a “Community Choir” — people from the community, and...
View ArticleEvensong at St Paul’s — from the inside
This week I am singing with the Ontario Cathedral Singers as they are doing a “cathedral week”, singing services in cathedrals while the regular choristers are away. I met their director, and had an...
View ArticleTransfiguration: updated
I’ve corrected Transfiguration, which I wrote in 2012. The new edition corrects some slightly dodgy Italian and also one of those pesky errors where Sibelius thinks it’s okay to put two quaver rests...
View ArticleEarly Music Experiences
Ruth of Moss and Jones asks: What are your earliest music experiences? What do you remember, perhaps vaguely, being played in your house when you were a toddler / pre-school aged child? This is...
View ArticlePied Beauty
A few weeks ago I spied a call for scores with a theme of nature, one or two parts and accompanied by piano. I asked on Twitter for suitable texts, preferably not too church-y because the context...
View ArticleTrinitie Sunday
A few weeks ago when Fr Duncan and I were discussing hymn lists, he said he’d like to have a lot of George Herbert this Sunday. It seemed like as good a reason as any to write an anthem. I launched...
View ArticleThaw
I wrote this for the Sing for Our Planet songbook — but it was just too short, one minute instead of five, and I didn’t like any of the things I tried to lengthen it. So, I submitted something else...
View ArticleTo Sail Beyond the Sunset
Here’s one I made earlier! I wrote this in autumn 2006; I’d asked for texts to set, and my then-sweetheart suggested these lines by Tennyson: Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world....
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St Paul’s Evensong at OccupyLSX
I didn’t think, when I got up this morning, that I would somehow wind up leading a BCP Evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral. The cathedral has had Occupy LSX, a protest camp, on their doorstep for the past...
View ArticleTransfiguration
One of the challenges of my job is finding music appropriate for our small choir at St Andrew’s. The Anglican choral tradition is wonderful and beautiful and has a tendency to assume you have altos,...
View ArticleGood problems
It’s getting near the time for the annual Carol Service at St Andrew’s Leytonstone, and rehearsals started last night. For the Carol Service we have a “Community Choir” — people from the community, and...
View ArticleThe Message of the Wind
I have a new choral work up on the Choral Public Domain Library: The Message of the Wind. This was written for the Nicola Dando Choral Composition Prize, which this year had five set texts; in the end,...
View ArticleArt is not a democracy.
A friend and I have been e-mailing back and forth about some issues at her church — the usual sort of thing, some members of the congregation being unhappy with the style of music chosen by the...
View ArticleGood problems
It’s getting near the time for the annual Carol Service at St Andrew’s Leytonstone, and rehearsals started last night. For the Carol Service we have a “Community Choir” — people from the community, and...
View Article