Full score and parts for hire, vocal score on sale from Faber Music Store, or from the Hire Library

Being a composer is about much more than creating attractive pictures in sound, or somehow adding to the canvas of our musical heritage. I believe that it is possible, indeed imperative, to harness the extraordinary power of music to heal and comfort, to allow a place for reflection and understanding, to reconcile and to nurture, and especially to articulate our collective or personal loss. For someone like me, who grew up in a community at a time in history mercifully protected from oppression, the unbearable suffering of others provokes a kind of stunned bewilderment, and I have witnessed many times how music is a way of giving voice to that emotional confusion. Unique amongst the arts, music has its own internal clock, transcending the ticking seconds, minutes, hours and days of conventional time. It is able – miraculously – to put us in any place at any time, suspending normality. The sound of a young person singing is the sound of inextinguishable hope.