I started composing when I was a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and studied music at New College, Oxford, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. My first experience of trying to exist as a composer was writing a musical based on Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” for a co-educational school in the Himalayan foothills. This taught me that composing was about writing and collaborating with people, adapting to their abilities, whilst at the same time challenging them. This has led me down the path of not only composing, but also being a musical director of music theatre, particularly of youth and community companies, conducting choirs and vocal groups and, out of necessity to survive, being a teacher and a pianist. My work has taken me from three years as Musician-in-Residence in the wilds of North Devon to creating productions all over UK and Poland, and performing and teaching in India, where I now live. My works range from choral works, such as “Tsunami Requiem”, a response to the 2004 tsunami, which was performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London, to large-scale music theatre works such as “Korczak” (about an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto), the production by Opera I Filharmonia Podlaska, Bialystock, being voted the most important historical event in Poland, 2012.
