Last weekend I had an experience that reminded me why I don’t teach grade exams in music.

I had a new student. He is musical and curious, with interests in film music, hip hop and (to my delight) Bartok. He had just failed his Grade 6 piano. He had been playing for years, but when asked what pieces he had enjoyed, he could not name one. He had quite liked a Bartok piece he’d started for a grade exam, but it was too hard, so he’d learnt an easier piece. In his words: “I’ve had to pick from the grade book each time, so I’ve never really liked anything.”

So I got to perform the role every teacher who’s ever watched a Hollywood film wants to play: throwing the textbook in the bin, and starting as if from scratch with music he liked. It was great fun, hopefully for both of us.

It has been a disastrous half-year for applications. I have applied to fifteen composition opportunities so far this year and received thirteen rejections (my final two rejections are pending by the 20th July).

Numbers soothe my soul, so  I have been carefully quantifying my rejection. I thought it might be encouraging. I know that I have low odds of scoring any given opportunity but maybe, in aggregate, my odds aren’t that bad. ​

Sound Unbound this weekend was excellent, I had a wonderful time as both an audience member and as a performer.
SANSARA’s performance of my piece was a wonderful experience. It’s a tricky work, but it had really clicked by the final rehearsal. I was overwhelmed with the response from the audience, who were incredibly generous in sharing many of their own stories of death with us after the show. I look forward to working through them and thinking about how they’ll affect the project.

Please do sign up to my mailing list there on the right if you want to stay up to date with the Vox Machina project, and to hear the recording when we put it out!  You should also sign up to SANSARA's to see all their future concerts.

I’m massively excited about our gig at Sound Unbound this weekend. I’ve never been to the festival before, but I’m very impressed with the programme, which has a huge range and some really excellent new music. The fact that it’s all free and almost all unticketed is quite something.

That said, it’s all rather overwhelming, so I thought I’d put together a pick of the festival for those who want to really make a weekend of it. Please do come to see us on Sunday: there’s very little choral and electronic music around, so it’s a really unique chance to hear a sound that is like little else.

Elsewhere in the programme, I think I’m most interested in Amir Konjani’s new piece, Mira Calix’s set and the 12ensemble’s performance. But that’s because I’ve already heard Liam Byrne, Bartosz Glowacki and James McVinnie. If you haven’t, I’d make sure you take the chance! So here, at some length, are my picks for the weekend:
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​I’m delighted to be able to announce a major ongoing project with SANSARA choir. We’ll be giving its first performing at the Barbican’s Sound Unbound festival at St. Bartholemew the Great on Sunday 19th May.

The project is called ‘Vox Machina’. It “joins together vocal and electronic music in a project that investigates the relationships between humanity and technology. It presents the human voice as both autonomous and automated: natural vocal resonances are processed, manipulated and deconstructed to produce new musical textures and striking sound effects.”

I’m very lucky to have been selected to take part in the London Symphony Orchestra’s Panufnik scheme next year. I’ll be writing a three-minute work for full orchestra early next year, leading up to a public workshop and performance in March.

Writing for orchestra is a wonderful opportunity. My current musical voice was shaped by writing an extended orchestral piece, London’s Other Bones. I wrote it independently, for no specific purpose, alongside a Masters, running Filthy Lucre and teaching in 2015. I was knackered, sad and receiving essentially no performances of my work. Writing it was a middle finger up to practicality: if my work wasn’t getting played, I might as well write the piece I wanted to, even if it was very difficult to ever put on.