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.

Every New Year I write a brief review of what I have been up to in the previous year: all the concerts, commissions, broadcasts etc - it is an entirely positive and rose-tinted appraisal of the previous 12 months. However, this year I’m finding that process just a little bit more difficult, and it is genuinely quite hard to paint a totally optimistic picture of 2020: as an academic and musician it has been a bleak and barren year, and one of the most challenging in my life.