On ‘The World on Fire’…

In Autumn 2015, I was very lucky to have three new works premiered across the country, for three different groups for three very different occasions. The first was on the 22 October where a community choir of local singers gave the first performance of my ‘fantasy’ for choir and tubular bells, By Reason of Darkness in the fading light and seagull calls of King’s College Quad to open that year’s SOUND festival in Aberdeen . The second (on the 21 November) was my oratorio, Noah’s Fire for baritone, choir, children’s voices and orchestra written for the 70th anniversary of the Chester Music Society and performed to a full house (and terrified composer) in the city’s cathedral. The final piece was the shortest, most conventional and least taxing to compose, The World on Fire, a four-minute work for The Choir of the Queen’s College, Oxford, for a forthcoming CD release. It will maybe come as no surprise that two of these works have yet to have a second performance (though I’m always hopeful), but one of them has had over fifty performances and continues to be my most performed and most well-travelled composition. That piece is, of course, The World on Fire.

I’ve written an on/off blog on music I admire for fifteen years, pithily looking at pieces by Howells, Elgar, Leighton and others, sometimes straying into more contemporary offerings, occasionally to pieces I like a little less than others. But I’ve never written about a work of my own and doing so makes me feel a mix of imposter-syndrome and utter revulsion. However, the continued performances of The World on Fire and the place it holds in my oeuvre gave me the compulsion to write something, and especially as the 28 November 2025 is the tenth anniversary of the first performance at The Queen’s College, in beautiful Oxford – it seemed fitting.  

As I mentioned, the piece was commissioned by the choir for a forthcoming CD, A New Heaven, which would go on to top the UK classical music charts following its release in March 2017. The choir wanted the piece to be a setting of some diary fragments by Prof Jackie Stedall, University Lecturer in the History of Mathematics and fellow of the college who had died the previous year, a great sadness to all who had known her at the university. I had worked with Jackie a little during my time as a Junior Fellow at Queen’s (2008-2010) and knew her to be a kind and thoughtful person and hugely supportive of music at the college. The diary entries were bucolic, pastoral and full of the wonderment and spiritual power of nature, they were also direct, evocative and a dream for a composer to set to music. The immediacy of Jackie’s text has undeniably been one of the reasons for the longevity of The World on Fire, people can easily understand the thoughts of the poet and the iridescent picture she paints. I don’t remember the exact words of the commission, but there was a sense the new piece should be similar in feeling to my earlier work The Eternal Ecstasy (2013) and in many ways it is, but this piece has touched people in a manner that the previous work has yet to manage.

The World on Fire is a simple piece in an obvious AABA form, where the A material is reflective and accompanimental and the B music more vivid, luminous and trying to capture some of the inherent power of the ‘energy, creation and love’ of Jackie’s words. The simplicity of form, harmony, melody and direction maybe one of the reasons for the piece’s modest success – it is at heart a melancholy sarabande, complete with drones, lush modal harmonies and a clear melody. It is towards the easier end of my pieces to perform (though it splits into multi-part in places), but like a lot of simple, emotional material, it must be done precisely and at the right tempo to fully convey the meaning of the music. I’m very lucky to have heard many performances of the piece and all of them have sought to capture the essence of the work as I intended.

The success of A New Heaven certainly helped The World on Fire to go further round the world than many of my works – it was a fine collection of revelation-themed pieces, a nice mix of old and new and had a very striking front cover of the planet being impacted by both fire and ice. A US premiere followed the CD release, and this led to further American performances in the pre-Covid years as well as premieres in Portugal, Poland and Ireland. After the pandemic, premieres appeared in the Netherlands, Sweden, Scotland and Canada and the piece has been broadcast (either live or the recording) in many different nations. I didn’t make the first performance in Oxford as I was at a different concert in Glasgow, in fact I didn’t get to hear the piece live until October 2022 when the Svanholm Singers and Carolinae Female Choir combined to perform the work at the Lund Choral Festival in Southwestern Sweden.

Funnily enough, reviews of The World on Fire were mixed once the CD was released, BBC Music Magazine called the piece ‘radiant’, but its competitor The Gramophone stated I was ‘stuck in a textbook neo-Impressionistic ecclesiastical rut’ – to this day, I’m not sure what that word-salad means. The organist and musicologist Dr Jonathan Clinch referred to the piece as a ‘glorious secular anthem’ in an article on my music in 2022 and that is the way I like to think of it. In the grand scheme of things, The World on Fire is a mere drop in the ocean compared to many composers and their continued success and it will always be such. But I’ve been deeply touched that performances of the piece have continued in the decade since its premiere and the work continues to resonate with people, far and wide, in a very different world to 2015.  

PAC