Here you
will find some of my compositions and a few thoughts on church music. My
compositions are entirely
"sacred" having been written specifically for church use.
This started with one or two carols which have been sung
since I was organist at Staple and Woodnesborough
churches near Sandwich in East Kent, UK. I hope to add
some more eventually, but the work that has excited me
the most has been the Millennium Communion Setting, now
in version 3, closely followed by my more recent hymn or worship song
You're there!. The Millennium Setting was in use at St Luke's,
Torquay from Easter - Advent 2007, really too long a period at one go! I was Organist
there until February 2008.
Even more exciting is a major
project on hymns and how to start them such that the music runs straight
into the verse and a bridge between verses separates the verses -
sometimes useful for singers and again the starts of the verses are
clearer. See Hymnstarts.
This has now been transferred to a
new site: www.thecompletehymn.co.uk
The
following links give more details of my music:
I use Music
Publisher by Braeburn Software. If you have MuP
version 8 or earlier, I may be able to send you the file or a sample
file to work with. Alternatively I can send files in PDF.
My music
background has been varied. I learnt piano at school and sang in the school choir. Later I
sang with the Cambridge
University Gilbert & Sullivan Society in The
Pirates of Penzance and Iolanthe under John Pryce-Jones
and The Sorcerer under Richard Hickox. I have sung with
and conducted several operatic societies and musical groups and
became interested again in church music from 1977 when I
joined the piano rota at St James, Southlake, Woodley
near Reading. My church life moved around several
churches including Bearwood near Wokingham, Catterick
Village in N Yorks, a number of churches in the
Canterbury area and latterly PPT Bovey Tracey in Devon, St Luke's Torquay,
and now St Paul's Newton Abbot.
I have
become progressively frustrated with church music as much
of it is pitifully out of touch with late 20th and early 21st century life
and much was singularly boring. In the average Anglican
church you might think it was Lent all year round from
the sullen looks on the faces of many in the
congregations! Yet these are often wonderful people with a strong faith. Along with many church musicians, I longed
for music that was considerably more upbeat, but without
losing the very best of the old or classical. I
particularly loathe the standard RSCM Ferial responses (Matins &
Evensong) especially the latter set in the minor key after the creed.
Musically the line ...and make thy
chosen people joyful sounds more
like... and make thy chosen people
miserable! No wonder we don't
relate to the younger generation - yet at music festivals
all over the UK we still seem to hang on to this awful setting just
because it is known and easier not to bother to learn something different.
The various
communion settings seemed to me to suffer much of the
same thing - the large number of locally written settings
suggests that the official ones from RSCM and others are
mediocre at best, and much that is in the big RSCM book
published just a few years ago is awful and frankly very
amateurish - wet was one apt description - sorry RSCM but this was a low
point! I have
not heard a good word about Volume 1.
Not that I
can claim anything that special about my music - you will
have to judge for yourself; but I try to make it as good
as I can. Here is the list and you can look at the pages
concerned to see if you like any of it.