What Sudden Blaze of Song is a setting of sections of John Keble’s beloved Christmas Day, famous for its powerful, memorable opening lines. Keble’s poem runs to eleven verses and for practicalities sake, I have taken the first two and sections of the final verse with the beautiful closing statement of ‘And in the darkness sing your carol of high praise.’ My piece aims to capture the atmosphere and majesty of this ‘blaze of song’ with solo lines and choral clusters alternating with more declamatory moments and fanfares of celebration. Song is present throughout, no more so than in the second verse where a long soprano solo is accompanied by a multitude of voices all singing the same song in wordless heterophony.

This short Advent antiphon aims to capture some of the anticipation and drama of the season and the coming of the Lord. The piece is essentially in three ‘waves’ each becoming more significant until the final line of ‘let us on put on the armour of light’ heralds a huge organ climax full or colour and fulfilment. 

The Missa Omnium Sanctorum is the first full setting (i.e. including the ‘Credo’) of the Mass that I have made and one of my largest unaccompanied choral works to date. The piece alternates between a sombre, shadowy F minor and a brighter, iridescent modal A major – the former for more prayerful and supplicative material, the latter for the more celebratory moments of praise and benediction. The two harmonic areas coincide and colour each other throughout and the overall mood of the work is reflective but benevolent. 

There have been many simple, prayerful settings of these heartfelt words and my offering is in a similar vein with more than a nod to the pieces by Walford Davies, Howells and Rutter.

The Suite (in modo semplice) is (as the title suggests) a collection of simple pieces for a small organ, or alternative. In writing the work I became reacquainted with Herbert Howells’s Lambert’s Clavichord, his set of pieces largely written in 1927 which were in many ways a love-letter to the Tudor period and the composers flourishing at that time. In no way are my pieces a pastiche of Howells, but rather acknowledging the inspiration of his work, which in turn acknowledges that of his Tudor forebears. I thought it made for a satisfying homage to English music that speaks to me above all others.  

The collection of pieces that comprises the Inventions and Sinfonias have resulted in my longest piece to date and the most concentrated spell of focussing on one instrument since my Transfiguration project for piano (2021-22). The work takes Bach’s monumental work of the same title as its inspiration, though the great master’s influence on the work is more formal and structural than anything musical or artistic. Bach’s work was designed for his students to learn two and three-part contrapuntal keyboard music in a creative and interesting way, fashioned from his own style of composition. Bach composed the two-part (Inventions) and three-part (Sinfonias) in ascending keys from those widely used in the period (eight major and seven minor keys). These two facets (the pedagogical and the tonal) are preserved in my Inventions and Sinfonias, mirroring the key structure of Bach’s and aiming these pieces at good players still on their instrumental learning journey.

Dialogue takes the ‘Sanctus’ of my 2017 work Missa Sancti Albanus as the source for a spirited exploration of the material and its possibilities on the organ. It largely follows the shape of the original but expands on each section aiming to realise the inherent potential of the music therein. The main deviation is at the end of the work, where the affirming ending of the Sanctus is replaced with a quiet dissipation of the dialogue between voices and musical material.