During this year…well the first half of it… I embarked on a composing project, setting some of poet Ian McMillan’s Early Stroll Tweets to music for the choir. Ian McMillan is a well-known poet and broadcaster here, and is from near Barnsley in South Yorkshire. Every morning he goes for a walk in his neighbourhood and when he gets back he writes a few sentences about what he’s noticed and posts them on Twitter. I’ve enjoyed these nuggets of poetic observation for a while now and decided to ask him if I could set one or more of them to music. He said I could use as many of them as I liked – I ended up using seven, each of which contained the word “silent” or “silence”! My idea was to create some songs that we could learn over Zoom…i.e. they leant themselves to getting out of synch and allowed for a few voices at a time. The first one I wrote was Even A Subdued Sky, which is a round and we did learn it over Zoom and did the first performance at our “live” Zoom concert at the end of March.

I used this track to accompany photos of some of the birds I’ve seen in 2021: Even A Subdued Sky