College Record 2014

Extra-curricular activities
The past year has been one of preparation for commemorating the centenary of the
outbreak of World War I. Last November, on Remembrance Sunday, my setting of
Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Futility’ was played in Australia on ABC Classic FM and,
in April, the London-based choir, Khoros, performed my setting of Ivor Gurney’s
‘Requiem’ at the National Portrait Gallery. I have just finished preparing these
two pieces, alongside four others, for publication by Shorter House, which will be
launched at the ABCD Annual Convention in Cardiff this year.
In addition, I have been working on a major new recording project A Multitude of
Voices with my choir, Sospiri. In 2013 the choir commissioned ten composers to
write new pieces based on texts from World War I. We encouraged the composers
to look beyond the popular poetical canon and cast their nets far and wide. In return
we received a superb set of new pieces with texts in French, English and German.
The CD is released on Convivium Records. My contribution was a piece in German
– ‘Urtod’ (Primal Death) – by the modernist poet August Stramm, plus two small
vignettes for piano trio and solo voices, turning extracts from letters by Wilfred
Owen and Edward Thomas into imagined conversations with their loved ones. The
choir was delighted that the Fournier Trio came and recorded these pieces with us.
It’s been an exciting, busy and fruitful year, and I’m looking forward to the
opportunities that the new academic year will bring.
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