Lyric Motets
For unaccompanied choir
The three motets were written independently between 2004 and 2008. High Flight is a setting of the poem by WW2 fighter pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr, who composed this sonnet "whilst descending from 40,000 feet" and sent it in a letter to his parents. He was killed in action a few weeks after his 19th birthday.
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Love is a setting of George Herbert's Love bade me welcome, famously set by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his Five Mystical Songs. This lyric
motet was composed in 2007 for the ordination as deacon of a curate at St Andrew's Church Rugby when I was Director of Music there.
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Pied Beauty sets Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem in praise of "Dappled Things" in nature and in human civilisation, and was first performed, also at St Andrew's Rugby, for Harvest Festival in 2009.
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