17 December 2025
I wrote a song. It’s called Natural State and was commissioned by the wonderful soprano Rebecca Lea for her New Winter Songbook project. She performs it with equally brilliant pianist Caroline Jaya-Ratnam on this Convivium Records release, and the score is published by Hal Leonard. You can also watch a video of the performance here.
The New Winter Songbook is a huge and ambitious undertaking and it was an honour to be asked to be part of it. The idiom of my piece feels somewhat different from most of the others, but that’s the pleasure of variety. Rebecca asked for a song that reflected Winter in Britain today. I wrote about what I saw in front of me, which was the header image above – a bleak November afternoon in County Durham. Winter as the unloved dumping-ground of the year, where the accumulated detritus of our society is revealed as foliage recedes. The poem (which is here in full) is a homage to the rich tradition of North East descriptive or topgraphical poetry, such as the South Shields poems of James Kirkup.
Thanks to Rebecca and Caroline for bringing it to life so completely in accord with my intentions.