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...

How I write songs

This is a description of how I go about composing choral works. I sometimes skip steps, sometimes take a lot longer over one step than other times. And of course, this is only what I do -- others may have very different approaches. 1) Choose a text. Nowadays this is a bit easier than it was when I was a teenager; there is an entire internet out there including many websites with poetry and quotes...