My Musical Journey
I was born in Redhill, Surrey, into a family which wasn’t particularly musical. My paternal grandparents did, however, have a piano in their home and I was fascinated by it, spending ages trying - not very successfully I might add - to make music from a very young age! When I was five years old, my family moved to Dorking, living next door to the Secretary of the Dorking Halls Concertgoers’ Society. Thanks to this connection, my mother started to take me to concerts there which, along with starting violin lessons at the age of 9, further deepened my interest in music.
Charterhouse - c.1971
I won a Surrey County Council-sponsored scholarship to Charterhouse in 1971 - a school with an excellent music department - and immediately started piano lessons. I felt this would help me to understand how music was structured, as I had no idea about this and was desperate to find out as I had wanted to compose ever since my first visits to the Dorking Halls.
Having developed a particular love for Baroque music from an early age, my earliest attempts at composition were pastiches inspired in particular by Handel, Purcell and Corelli, but at the age of 16, I reluctantly faced up to the fact that I was living in the 20th century rather than the 17th or 18th and started to develop a more contemporary style. Following in the footsteps of Vaughan Williams, Hindemith and, more recently, Arvo Pärt, I made a detailed study of music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ending up writing pieces which belong stylistically to the present day but which nonetheless draw inspiration from the past – sometimes the very distant past.
I went on to study music at Oxford University, choosing composition as one of my options. With no doors opening for a career in music after I finished my degree, my composition more or less ground to a halt, the process being aided and abetted by the harsh reality of needing to earn my keep! When my setting of Wilfred Owen’s poem Futility for tenor and piano was performed in Winchester in 1981, it was to be the last advertised public performance of any of my compositions for 37 years.
During that period, my musical life was in a state of semi-dormancy. I sometimes played the piano or organ for the various churches I attended over the years and even wrote a short piece for violin and piano for a friend in 1994, but that was more or less it. Deep down, I felt sure that one day I would come back to music and that moment came in August 2017 when I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to join a local choir which was planning to perform Handel’s Messiah the following December.
This led to a comprehensive musical renaissance. Not only have I come back to choral singing, which I love, but I resumed serious organ playing and above all, returned to composition. What has been so remarkable is that in spite of such a long gap during which I hardly composed anything, the pieces I have written since 2017 are much better than virtually anything I wrote in my teens and early 20s! I have reviewed and re-written a number of these early works, although most of the pieces listed on this website have been composed since 2017.
I joined the Sussex Composers’ group New Music Brighton in 2018 and have since had the privilege of hearing a number of my works performed in the Brighton area. Other highlights have been the performance of my six-part motet O Vos Omnes in St Anne’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, Belfast in August 2019 and a superb rendition of my Concerto Grosso by the Musicians of All Saints in Lewes on 2nd March 2024.
Outside of composition, I sing bass with the Brighton Consort, a specialist Renaissance choir and occasionally play the hymns on the organ at Mayfield Baptist Chapel where my wife and I are members. I do not, however, have the slightest desire to be a regular church organist although I love playing Bach’s organ works in particular and am working to try to reach the necessary standard to give an organ recital one day. I believe it is important for aspiring composers to be active musicians – you can never expect to write the great music of the future if you don’t regularly interact with the great music of the past.
Having developed a particular love for Baroque music from an early age, my earliest attempts at composition were pastiches inspired in particular by Handel, Purcell and Corelli, but at the age of 16, I reluctantly faced up to the fact that I was living in the 20th century rather than the 17th or 18th and started to develop a more contemporary style. Following in the footsteps of Vaughan Williams, Hindemith and, more recently, Arvo Pärt, I made a detailed study of music from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ending up writing pieces which belong stylistically to the present day but which nonetheless draw inspiration from the past – sometimes the very distant past.
I went on to study music at Oxford University, choosing composition as one of my options. With no doors opening for a career in music after I finished my degree, my composition more or less ground to a halt, the process being aided and abetted by the harsh reality of needing to earn my keep! When my setting of Wilfred Owen’s poem Futility for tenor and piano was performed in Winchester in 1981, it was to be the last advertised public performance of any of my compositions for 37 years.
During that period, my musical life was in a state of semi-dormancy. I sometimes played the piano or organ for the various churches I attended over the years and even wrote a short piece for violin and piano for a friend in 1994, but that was more or less it. Deep down, I felt sure that one day I would come back to music and that moment came in August 2017 when I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to join a local choir which was planning to perform Handel’s Messiah the following December.
This led to a comprehensive musical renaissance. Not only have I come back to choral singing, which I love, but I resumed serious organ playing and above all, returned to composition. What has been so remarkable is that in spite of such a long gap during which I hardly composed anything, the pieces I have written since 2017 are much better than virtually anything I wrote in my teens and early 20s! I have reviewed and re-written a number of these early works, although most of the pieces listed on this website have been composed since 2017.
I joined the Sussex Composers’ group New Music Brighton in 2018 and have since had the privilege of hearing a number of my works performed in the Brighton area. Other highlights have been the performance of my six-part motet O Vos Omnes in St Anne’s Church of Ireland Cathedral, Belfast in August 2019 and a superb rendition of my Concerto Grosso by the Musicians of All Saints in Lewes on 2nd March 2024.
Outside of composition, I sing bass with the Brighton Consort, a specialist Renaissance choir and occasionally play the hymns on the organ at Mayfield Baptist Chapel where my wife and I are members. I do not, however, have the slightest desire to be a regular church organist although I love playing Bach’s organ works in particular and am working to try to reach the necessary standard to give an organ recital one day. I believe it is important for aspiring composers to be active musicians – you can never expect to write the great music of the future if you don’t regularly interact with the great music of the past.
