From the Concert Hall to the Living Room: Why I Am Changing How I Compose
For most of my adult life, I have been a composer of contemporary classical music: the kind performed in concert halls and at new music festivals, often supported by institutions and judged by panels. It’s a world I once found deeply stimulating: intellectually rigorous, aesthetically adventurous, and grounded in traditions I loved.
But it’s also a world that has changed.
When I began composing professionally in the late 1990s, artistic merit—however contested or subjective—was the currency of the realm. After a long and painful hiatus due to a psychotic break, I returned to the scene in 2017 and found it radically transformed. Identity categories now shaped programming priorities. Demographic representation had become an institutional imperative. The language of the arts was no longer simply about sound, expression, or form; it was about optics, equity, and visibility.
It’s not that I oppose inclusion or historical redress. But I found myself in a system where aesthetic judgment had been eclipsed by ideological signalling. Where curators seemed more fearful than bold. And where composers—especially those not fitting the ‘right’ demographic profile—were increasingly sidelined, not because of their music, but in spite of it.
Gradually, I came to a decision that felt both difficult and liberating: I would step back. I would no longer hawk my scores around or bend my creative impulses to fit a cultural agenda. I would still write music, still enter the occasional call for scores, still cherish the chance to hear my work performed in concert: but I would no longer try to make a career out of it. That, to me, began to feel like flogging a dead horse.
Instead, I would do something both smaller and larger—I would return to the roots of why I compose in the first place.
That’s how Your Special Song was born.
It’s a simple idea. You tell me about someone you love—your partner, your parent, your best friend—and I transform that story into a bespoke, professionally recorded song. A wedding gift, an anniversary surprise, a tribute, a legacy. These songs are not written for funding panels or critics. They’re written for the people who matter to you, and for the moments that matter most.
To some in the contemporary music world, this might seem like a retreat. But to me, it feels like a return. A return to music as connection rather than abstraction. As gift rather than commodity. As human expression rather than cultural signalling.
I write songs with the same craft and care I have brought to concert works: my first was to Michelle, my fiancée. But now, the audience isn’t a jury or a board; it’s a couple exchanging vows, or a parent honouring their child, or a family remembering someone they’ve lost. And in those spaces, the emotional stakes are higher, not lower. The music means more.
In September 2025, I’m relocating to Arizona to marry Michelle. With that move comes a fresh start: a new country, a new focus, and a new kind of composing—one rooted in connection, not careerism.
Your Special Song is not just a business. It’s a philosophy. It’s a kind of quiet resistance. A belief that meaning matters more than metrics. That beauty and depth don’t need institutional validation. That a song, made with care and love, can carry more truth than a season’s worth of concert programming.
So yes, I’ve walked away from the compositional career ladder. But I haven’t walked away from music. I’ve just changed the room in which it, to my mind, truly lives.
‘Standard Deviations’ at Dublin’s National Concert Hall
Ireland’s National Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance of ‘Standard Deviations’ on Tuesday 14th November, as part of Composer Lab 2023. It was a thrill to hear this piece come to life under the baton of Gavin Maloney. You can find the performance, broadcast by Lyric FM, on the ‘Works’ page. I introduced the piece by saying that the title is from statistics, denoting how far a particular value lies or deviates from the mean value; and that its applicability to music is that once you have a musical context you can deviate from it either by a little or by a lot. What I forgot to say is that I just like the title for the hell of it.
The Penhill Giant in Skipton
On Wednesday 11th October, 230 primary school children filed into Skipton Town Hall to hear ‘The Penhill Giant’. Writer Sally Edwards based her text on the legend of the Wensleydale giant, and narrator Claire-Marie Seddon brought that text vividly to life with the help of Skipton Camerata conducted by Ben Crick. This was a particularly pleasurable project for me as I was writing for children, with virtually the same forces as Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf’. I felt great relief that the piece appealed to its young audience, given their rapt attention during the performance and their warm appreciation at the end of it. I am often struck by the perceptiveness of children’s listening (John Berger noticed the same thing with their appreciation of visual art) and a few times in my life I’ve been approached by them with intelligent, probing questions about what they have heard. That my music in general appeals to kids is a considerable source of pride for me. Below is the first performance, captured on a mobile phone and Zoom recorder!
Cross-Eyed Interview
On 29th April of this year, Frances Wilson interviewed me for her ‘Meet The Artist’online interview series. You can find the interview here
Song cycle released by Voces8 Records
On Friday 4th March Voces8 records released Within a Certain Time and Place to words by Chinwe D John. Chinwe, a GP in the United States, contacted me last year to commission a song using her lyrics, and the project grew from there. The songs explore themes of hope, fate and love, and they were recorded last June by Andy Staples and Alisdair Hogarth in the magnificent church of St Jude’s, Hampstead. You can audition/purchase the songs here
Taylor Taylor
In 2011 director Ben Galster approached me to write the music for a viral for Taylor Taylor, a well known hairdressing salon in London. We tried out many temp tracks to see what might work, and decided in the end to go with a notionally classically oriented score that would help tell a story in a short time. I had to write the same music for two contrasting virals, which was a challenge to make work at the level of synchronisation with the images! ‘Our Hands, Your Beauty’ has remained on the internet while ‘A Magical Place’ got lost at some point. Using the workprint, I re-uploaded the latter. You can watch the two virals below. The violinist is me.
Blush Furiously
It is a fact that a lot of film music written gets rejected for various reasons (think of Alex North’s score to ‘2001’). This was the case with ‘Blush Furiously’, a film I scored at the National Film and Television School. Sometimes the music can be re-used for other projects, but in this case the music was so specific to the mood and style of the film that I have not been able to find an alternative use for it. So here are the amalgamated cues below.
An anniversary—addendum
I found the score of my Variations I! I wrote it when I was fifteen, and am quite impressed by this piece of juvenilia. The London Sinfonietta recording has been lost after so many house moves, so I mocked up the score instead.
Pocket Universe revisited
Pocket Universe was first performed on 22nd March 2019 by EXAUDI conducted by James Weeks. This was a pre-pandemic performance, and none of us knew what horrors awaited us around the corner. The singers did splendidly, and their performance was the best I had heard my music performed in many a year. So far I’ve had interest in the piece from Chamber Choir Ireland and the Festino Choir of St Petersburg, but unfortunately the pandemic seems to have militated against further performances. So I decided to see what a four-piano version of the piece would sound like in the interim (listen below). The fleeting dissonances are more acutely felt in the piano version than in the original. Piano is ‘digital’, voices are ‘analogue’! I’ve done nothing at all to improve the piano sounds.
An anniversary
On Friday 6th May 1988, when I had just turned sixteen, I made my way to the Purcell Room at the South Bank Centre, London, for my first ever professional performance. The occasion was a workshop led by George Benjamin and David Bedford, and the players were the London Sinfonietta. My mentor Michael Finnissy was in the audience, as were family members. I also remember Gillian Moore looking distinctly gothic! Cellist Lionel Handy played a ferociously difficult passage for cello solo superlatively, and the experience overall was one of great joy. I intend to find the score to ‘Variations I’, which is in a box somewhere among my belongings, to see if it is any good. I remember it has Boulezian characteristics, despite a fake-minimalist beginning. I think that even then my musical personality was incipiently there: the jokes, the virtuosity, the energy…