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By my bedside lies a shifting but semi-permanent pile of poetry books. Sometimes I dive into them just for pleasure before dropping off to sleep, but mostly I open them when I’m hunting for a text to set to music. There are secular and sacred anthologies that are equally cherished: The New Oxford Book of English Verse, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Sidgewick and Chambers’ Early English Lyrics and Shakespeare’s works alongside the King James Bible, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the Liber Usualis, and R. L. Greene’s The Early English Carols, and a changing cast of many others.
As with countless other composers, my music has often been inspired and nourished by words. The writing of vocal and choral music has been like a golden thread running through my whole life, and this year of my round-number birthday has afforded a welcome opportunity to continue weaving the thread and to gather together five of my recent choral pieces in a single recording with my beloved Cambridge Singers. 
With all five pieces, the music was sparked off by the texts, and their authors could hardly be more different. I’ll make me a world, the most substantial piece, has a text by the African-American poet and early civil rights campaigner James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), and it retells the creation story from Genesis in touchingly direct, vernacular language that seemed to cry out for musical setting. I made use of the full resources of orchestra, choir, and two soloists for this, my latest work.
The same could be said of the eight poems by Charles Causley (1917–2003), which I set for choir and harp in 2024 under the title Dancing Tree. Causley is one of my favourite twentieth-century poets – keen amateur pianist, schoolteacher in his native Cornwall, and a master of deceptively simple, sometimes folk-like imagery that leaps off the page. Do try him.
London Town, bringing together adult and children’s choirs as does my Mass of the Children, is a celebration of my native city. For this set of seven pieces I drew on texts by Raleigh, Wordsworth and Kipling – and was delighted to call on a young, living poet, Delphine Chalmers, for two new texts.
Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was a poet much favoured by English composers of the earlier twentieth century, but, surprisingly, no one seemed to have set When music sounds, a brief, rather touching ode of music’s power of enchantment.
Oh – last but not least, I was more than happy to join the long list of composers who have set Shakespeare to music. Thank you, Will, for being such a rich and continuing source of inspiration to us all.
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Release day for the full album: 10 October 2025
A track from the album: When Music Sounds