Composition Competition winner

I spent a very pleasant hour on Friday with a very talented and personable young man. One of the members of Southwell Choral Society has put up the money to run a choral composition competition and the aforementioned young man is the winner of the first competition.

The competition is to enable a body of new works suitable for an amateur choral society with modest resources. There were three entries, all of which met the criteria to a certain extent. The winner is Will Handysides, a first year composition student at Trinity College in London. His successfull entry is a setting of Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush for choir and orchestra. The choral parts are well written for amateur chorus with good voice leading and good cues. The orchestra parts are quite demanding but well within the capabilities of the excellent players who populate the orchestras who accompany the amateur choral tradition.

Nothing puts off a conductor more than the constantly changing time signatures (often with 5 or 7s on the top!) that most modern composers litter their scores with. Will avoids that trap - the only 7/8 is at a moment of rest - making the piece easy to conduct with very easily managed tempo changes.

We are looking forward to working on it and to a very exciting performance on Saturday, March 31st in Southwell Minster.