This is dedicated to the memory of John Bacchus Dykes, the Victorian hymn-tune composer. I imagine him sitting at the piano in an empty church improvising a tune, a slow, sad, stately hymn, as visions of the divine visit him, sweeping the music up and away into clouds and billows and fragments, the hymn tune dissolving into rocking, oscillating figures on piano and washes of brass and strings, returning as a ghostly echo towards the end. It's an attempt at some kind of homage or memorial or tribute to Dykes, whose hymns are still powerfully moving today.

Adagio for Piano and Orchestra -  In Memoriam John Bacchus Dykes

Piece for string orchestra. 

I'm imagining the wind blowing over the railway tracks at night.

Nocturne - The Wind On The Tracks Is Dreaming

This is intended as an act of devotion towards Tallis's 1570 masterpiece for forty voices, Spem in Alium. I've followed Tallis's plan of eight choirs of five, each choir here comprising four horns in F and a tuba. Tallis composed Spem in Alium for an octagonal room, the choirs positioned in a circle, the sound surrounding the audience. I've used the stereo image as a poor substitute for this, panning the eight choirs from left to right. I've taken the first few bars of Spem in Alium and put them through various broadly canonic 'treatments', allowing them to 'freeze', echo, fade in and out and appear to move around the stereo space, as if blown about on air currents, creating a kind of ambient soundscape. The way the sounds move through space is a structuring principle. This may be the opening section of a longer piece. Headphones best.

Ceremonial for Thomas Tallis, for Forty Brass Instruments

Lux Aeterna

A setting for SATB choir and piano of the first five verses of the Gospel of John.
I'm imaging a vast cosmic wheel, turning and turning into infinity, as the creation unfolds.

1	in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum

In the beginning was the Word: and the Word was with God: and the Word was God.

2	hoc erat in principio apud Deum

The same was in the beginning with God.

3	omnia per ipsum facta sunt et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est

All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made.

4	in ipso vita erat et vita erat lux hominum

In him was life: and the life was the light of men.

5	et lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non conprehenderunt

And the light shineth in darkness: and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Simon Maginn