June continues the increase in performances in our post-Covid world (depending on your point of view…) beginning with a trio of performances of Alma Redemptoris Mater (2020) by the University of Aberdeen Chamber Choir on tour in the Orkney Isles. Sandwiched in the middle of this is another performance of Regina Coeli (2020) by the Choir of All Saints, Fulham, conducted by Jonathan Wikeley. The amazing Pro Coro Canada will give the Canadian premiere of The World on Fire (2015) in Edmonton on the 19th, followed by two performances of O Lord, Save Thy People (2022) by the Choir of St Chad’s College, Durham.

The death of the great Sir Harrison Birtwistle earlier this month was a seismic moment in British contemporary music, arguably the end of an era and a moment to assess the position new classical music holds in British cultural life. Birtwistle’s long creative life has rightly been lauded in all the right places with a genuine feeling that an individual and original voice had been lost and that it wasn’t instantly apparent where such voices might come from in the future. It doesn’t take much for the contemporary music machine to indulge in a period of naval gazing, but maybe this was allowed following such a momentous departure.

May sees the first performances of two substantial new works in London and the Lake District. On the 7th, the Festival Te Deum will be premiered on the opening night of the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music at St Pancras Church, London by the festival singers and Christopher Bactchelor. On the 21st, the Wordsworth Singers and Adderbury Ensemble will give the first performance of Thread About My Heart, written for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth’s birth in my hometown of Keswick.

The end of March and April sees some performances of my works around the world. Sunday 27 March sees the second performance of Folksongs (2021) by Christopher Baxter in Aberdeen, followed the week after by a performance of Green (2012) by the Caritas choir in Canterbury. The month finishes with the premiere of my Dickinson setting Waiting (2021) by Brian Stevens and the Nazareth College Chamber Singers in New York State, USA.

February sees two world premieres in Scotland and Germany, and could herald the beginning of an exciting and succesful year (worldwide pandemics notwithstanding). On the 8th, Manfred Grob will premiere my most recent organ work, Fantasia, in Dortmund and two days later Duncan Honeybourne will give the first performance of my set of piano Folksongs in Aberdeen.

As I do every year, I try to write a short review of the outgoing year trying to collate all my comings-and-goings and giving some sort of pithy overview of my achievements (or lack thereof). 2021 has proven to be another extremely difficult COVID year, though perhaps not quite the horror-show that 2020 proved to be. It began with another lockdown (with resulting homeschooling and online teaching) and ended with more chaos and uncertainty, but there were moments, glimpses, of something more positive as performances did happen, music was made and at times some sort of normality did prevail.

It’s that time of year where I try to gather my thoughts towards all things Christmas and to try and think positively about the forthcoming celebrations and festivities and not dwell too much on the continuing gloom and the desperate game of Russian roulette we play as to whether we will be able to visit family or not. I guess I managed it last year in equally difficult circumstances, so I should be able to do it again amidst the wafer-thin gaieties of Christmas 2021! And in any case, my Christmas offering this year is a little more special than usual (of course, every blog I write is special…) as for the first time, I get to preview a brand-new carol before it has even been performed! It is quite the honour!

One of the more difficult conversations I have regularly with other composers is regarding how performers, conductors and promoters access my music – how can an intrepid high-school choir from Iowa or an adventurous choral society from Ipswich get a copy of my latest offering into their delicate and nuanced hands? This is as question as old as time, well not really, but certainly a pertinent question since the advent of music publishing or maybe even a concern of composers from an even earlier epoch as well.

Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but just recently I have felt the green shoots of some sort of post-COVID recovery taking place in music-making. This could of course be a false dawn, or blind optimism on my part, but I’m going to take it as a positive thing in any case. I’ve written some music, am writing some music, and people are paying me to write more music - all of which is good.

I had a very nice online conversation with a senior composer recently which helped me feel better about myself and my work and it was all very jolly – its always nice to get some form of validation, whatever stage you are in your career, particularly from someone you admire. However, during the conversation a rather innocuous question arose – ‘do you conduct as well as compose?’. Nothing unusual about that, many composers are also conductors even if they mainly conductor their own music. I of course answered, ‘no’. But I guess what was a little more surprising was the silence that greeted my answer to the follow up question…

Another year swiftly flies by as these COVID years seem to have a habit of doing (they somehow manage to be simultaneously long and short) and I realised I hadn’t updated much since January. Now, that is mainly that I don’t have much to update with, but I’ll try and bring together what I’ve been busy with in the past eight months.

As we settle into another protracted period of lockdown in the UK (and in many other parts of the world as well) I thought it might be a good time to have another look at the strange circumstances that currently surround the profession in which I work and how this is effecting me as a creative artist. When I wrote about isolation and creativity in April 2020 there was a certain amount of novelty and optimism about the lockdown, a rare opportunity to take some time and to concentrate on one’s art or to learn a new skill and to return to the creative world with renewed vigour and purpose in the autumn.