I am very excited to announce that my song cycle google poems, for soprano and piano right-hand, has been chosen to be showcased as part of Music for Youth's flagship National Festival in July 2015.

The piece will be performed by soprano Heather Young, with me at the piano, on the final day of the Festival in Birmingham as part of the New Music Stage. I'm really looking forward to performing the piece in front of a large audience, and hearing the other new compositions!

google poems was premiered by soprano Danae Eleni and pianist Guy Newbury in May 2014, Oxford, where it won the St Anne's Inaugural Composition Competition.

Programme note from the score:

I was motivated to write this song cycle by an article I read in The Huffington Post. The article's author had typed various short, incomplete phrases into the search engine Google, and had noted down, in order, Google's suggestion at completing the author's initial search. For example, if one simply types 'is it' into Google, the search engine will suggest complete thoughts such as 'is it going to snow', and 'is it a full moon'. What struck me about this idea was that these were not merely ideas generated by a computer, but a series of phrases created based on what real people were actually searching for. In the increasingly virtual world in which we all live, there is something profoundly moving about the idea of someone typing 'i want to know what love is' or 'why do men cheat' into their computer. As an ode to this virtual existence, and the distracted attention with which everyday experiences are encountered by most people, I wanted the pianist to be both restricted in the use of one hand, and paradoxically freer to explore almost the entire register of the piano with just these five fingers.