Waiting is a simple and warm setting of Emily Dickinson’s poem of the same name. The piece is in a clear ABA form with sustained material and prominent solo soprano bookending more arioso and cantabile material. My piece relates directly to the COVID-19 pandemic with obvious references to ‘singing’ and ‘keeping the dark away’ at the heart of the composition.

Canticum Mariae Virginis juxtaposes two texts, both regarding the Virgin Mary, but offering different yet complementary accounts of the Blessed Virgin. As well as pairing these texts, the piece also uses two different languages and two points of view in its six-minute duration.

Fantasia is my longest single-movement organ work to date and forms part of a current preoccupation with transforming or transfiguring previous musical materials into something of a more beautiful or spiritual state. In this case, the Fantasia is a transfiguration of a motet of mine Veni Sancte Spiritus (‘Come Holy Ghost’) that I finished in 2012 but had begun much earlier in c.2004.

Coronach is the culmination of four years of incremental work and carries on a current preoccupation with integrating elements of Scottish history and culture into my work. The piece is in seven movements and alternates between settings of Scottish romantic poetry with Gaelic folksongs collected by Hamish Henderson (1919-2002), a renaissance man of mid-twentieth century Scottish poetry and folklore.

Folksongs are simple ‘re-imaginings’ of well-known English folksongs that have long since left their natural surroundings to become cultural artefacts in their own right. Another word for the compositional process might be ‘deconstruction’ as each folksong is reduced to a handful of key features, such as a melodic fragment, a cadence or a rhythmic gesture and pieced together in a different fashion.

As The Mirk Night is a set of four relatively simple arrangements of these beautiful Burns songs for choir. I have tried to keep as close to the originals as possible with the odd change of texture and harmony here and there adding a twenty-first century gloss to the piece. They form part of a wider concern in my work that involves engaging with Scottish culture and history.