I don't know what my avant-garde teenage self would think of this, but I'm glad to announce that I have a piece included in Friday Night is Music Night, for 70 years a Radio 2 staple, which is making the leap to BBC Radio 3 tonight. I guess no-one yet knows how the programme will fare there; in recent times Music Night moved to Sunday, and seemed to have retired completely late last year.   I went up to Alexandra Palace to hear the BBC Concert Orchestra rehearsing tonight's broadcast programme, which as ever is an idiosyncratic mix of 'light music', mini classical favourites and show tu ..read more

I was actually awestruck by a recent LSO performance I heard at the Barbican, in front of a big audience who were nearly all aged 7 and under. I was there to hear my piece Music Spread Thy Voice somehow included in a 50-minute event called Musical Mechanics. (In the foyer beforehand, crowded with people three feet tall, I easily spotted my fellow composer Jonathan Dove, whose exciting and pacey piece Run to the Edge was also on the programme.)   Conductor Timothy Redmond is someone I know from very different contexts - I recently worked with him on both an opera production and an orches ..read more

Scotland Unwrapped is a great series running all through this year at King's Place in London. Quite rightly, it includes many folk musicians and a lot of spoken word events. People in Scotland might take a view on which contemporary composers are being played, but I am enjoying the programming as an unusually thorough English view of Scotland. I can't remember anything like this before, on this scale, happening down here in the south.   ORA Singers' programme about the 1603 Union of the Scottish and English Crowns was certainly an event that belonged here. It was fascinating to hear dar ..read more

I've been a patron of the Martin Read Foundation for quite a few years now, and find it an inspiration in the music education landscape. Martin was an outstanding composer-educator, Head of Music at Alton College for 23 years, and a great many people remember him warmly, not least his successful students. The Foundation created in his memory supports teenage composers from the area (on a shoestring, inevitably) in ingenious ways. Some MRF graduates have gone on to study composition at music college; others have simply enjoyed the creative buzz and interaction with professional performers ..read more

Amongst the many famous London landmarks I should have visited well before now is Alexandra Palace. It's not exactly hidden away. But at last, thanks to a summons from the BBC Concert Orchestra, I boarded an overground train, starting out deep within Moorgate tube station, and soon found myself on a bracing hill walk, way above north London.   Outdoing our south London equivalent, Crystal Palace, "Ally Pally" burned down twice in its 150-year history, but in recent years has been well-used for its frequent pop spectaculars and year-round ice rink. Breathtakingly, its Theatre has been b ..read more

The Big Picture is a cantata posing the question "does music actually have colours ? " which I originally wrote for the 2019 reopening of Aberdeen Art Gallery.  It has just received its North American premiere, by Harvard University Choir under Edward Elwyn Jones, which you can hear here (beginning at 54'50".)   This excellent performance sounds, to me, very different from the Aberdeen premiere, and also from the Delphian recording by Bristol Choral Society - in the sense of being alternative, rather than better. The scoring of the piece is for two choirs, including in the origina ..read more

The Royal College of Music's wind day (see previous post) ended with an evening concert of music by British composers. The RCM, naturally, organised a composer panel to preface this event. Afterwards, RCM's Head of Composition, Jonathan Cole, kindly sent us this souvenir photo; I feel it's a classic of the "Composers on a Panel" genre. For extra marks.... ...ok, from left to right: Jonathan Cole, Sally Beamish, Julian Anderson, Grace-Evangeline Mason, myself, Robin Haigh. It was a true pleasure to catch up with the whole lot of them ..read more

Fresh Air is one of the pieces I wrote during the lockdowns, a "serenade" for multiple woodwinds. It was originally intended for the National Youth Orchestra's Inspire programme, a project that supports state school-educated instrumentalists with the participation of current NYO members. The orchestra "did me proud", eventually giving a beautiful performance in one of their high profile concerts in the the Royal Festival Hall.   However, my original inspiration had been a vision of a really big group of wind players, rows and rows of them filling the stage and the surrounding air. For ..read more

For quite a while I have been writing a new chamber orchestra piece, to be premiered by the Knussen Chamber Orchestra at Aldeburgh this summer. Its title is Planet, and it's a set of three orchestral studies inspired by the increasingly remarkable photographs of our planet, and galaxy, taken by spacecraft over the last thirty years. The images I chose came from Apollo 17, Voyager 1 and the Hubble Space Telescope.   One un-obvious feature of this project was the size of orchestra available. You'd perhaps hope to explore a huge, cosmic subject like this by means of a colossal Richard Strau ..read more

It is always a visual pleasure, and usually a musical one, to enter Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw, perched over the IJ water. This was my second time as a juror on the Alba Rosa Viëtor Competition, for composers under the age of 35. My previous visit to the competition took place during a force 11 gale blowing huge waves against the glass walls of the building, and the police and fire brigade urging everyone in the whole country to stay indoors. I'll never forget it.   But this year's edition also had its excitements, due especially to the extraordinary lineup for which the competition entrie ..read more