Musical Hat Draw: “Stars”

Welcome to the inaugural, experimental, Musical Hat Draw! For this round, the theme is “stars”. If you have a favourite poem about stars that you’ve always wanted to hear set to music, or if you’ve written about stars and wonder what your poem might sound like sung, the Musical Hat Draw is for you. How it works: From today until midnight BST on 11th September, you can send me text...

Sonnet 27

The Fourth Choir had a composing competition, which I entered. I didn't make their shortlist, so here is my setting of Shakespeare's Sonnet 27. The words, of course: Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, The dear repose for limbs with travel tired; But then begins a journey in my head, To work my mind, when body's work's expired: For then my thoughts (from far where I abide) Intend a zealous...

Copyright, Creativity and Culture

I got up this morning to see much hand-wringing on Twitter over Green policy on copyright. The policy in question states: EC1011 On cultural products (literature, music, film, paintings etc), our general policy is to expand the area of cultural activity, that is ways that culture can be consumed, produced, and shared, reduce the role of the market and encourage smaller and more local cultural...

Patreon, one year on

It's a little over a year since I first set up a page on Patreon, with a view to getting paid for some of my composing. I've been promising to write a post about my experiences, and I'm finding the "what" and the "why" aren't easy to consider separately. But I'll have a go at discussing the "what" in this post, and the "why" in the next. Patreon is a platform for distributed, or crowd-funded,...

Open Volume

I am looking for words and music for a hymnal. The working title is "Open Volume: singable, photocopiable hymns". The intent is to create a body of new hymnody which will be available to churches as a supplement, or as individual pieces; to showcase the work of writers and composers who might not gain the attention of traditional publishers; and to make the advantages of Creative Commons...

Music and Livelihood

I am not going to be able to work as a performer for the rest of my life. There are a number of reasons for this, and none of them are up for discussion in this post, but my current strategy is not working and is unsustainable. However, I am a musician through and through: when I am not making music I am pretty miserable. So I've been thinking lately about how to make a living as a musician,...

Metrical Psalms for Advent

I want to encourage the use of psalms in liturgy. To this end I have committed to compiling a small booklet of metrical psalms for use this coming Advent (Year B). As with everything else I publish I will release the work under a CC BY-SA licence so that other people can use it, free of charge, without having to bother me for permission.I aim to have two settings of each of the psalms for the...

A bit about why I use the CC licenses I do.

When I write music I release it under a Creative Commons license. I usually use a CC BY-SA license, known as Attribution-ShareAlike. This means people can use it, without first asking me, as long as they give me attribution and any derivative works they make are shared under a similar license. If I am using CC BY-SA then they are free to earn money for derivative works, but since they have to...

Psalter Commons

I have a new project! It's called Psalter Commons and I would love your help with it. I'd like the words of the psalms to be freely available for liturgy and study, but copyright law means the only truly free translations are quite old. If you have translated or paraphrased a psalm or many psalms, please feel free to add the texts! They don't need to have music, though if you do have music that's...

Words, words!

When I write music, I struggle with the words. As a child I was a decent poet, I'm told, but at some point I lost the habit of writing poetry in a notebook in spare moments. I think it may have been around the time I took up playing the horn and got a paper route and somehow seemed to always be out at one rehearsal or another! These days, most of the words I write are typed directly onto a screen...