This piece is scored for Soprano and Piano. A Penny for a Song was written in Autumn 1981 for Penny Price Jones and Philip Martin who commissioned it with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain. It consists of ten songs prefaced by a piano piece which acts as a refrain heard again between Nos. 6 and 7 and before the last song.All the texts are miniatures; some are haiku a Japanese Zen poetic form and they all have in common a number of Haiku characteristics such as vivid imagery seasonal or natural and allusive brevity. The poems are small but they have a resonance extending far beyond themselves. Zen artists love to play with space: through afew brush strokes they conjure up a world of detail; they suggest infinitely expanding space through the implications of a few lines on a nearly empty background. This has been my approach in the music of A Penny for a Song. The songs are fleeting momentary; they are echoes of a world that is always there if we stop to listen for it.

For Soprano and Piano. Text: Lord Byron. Commissioned by Trinity College Cambridge for Lord Byron's Bicentenary. Premiered by Lorna Anderson and Malcolm Martineau.

A3 Size Score-Edward Thomas was born in Lambeth on 3rd March 1878 and spent most of his childhood in London. His holidays however were spent with relatives in Swindon and it was there that he developed his abiding love of all things rural. He was educated at St Paul's Hammersmith and was encouraged in his creative writing by James Ashcroft Noble whose daughter he secretly married after her father's death and to the great disapproval of her family. Despite growing anxiety over poverty ill health and literary discouragement which exacerbated a natural tendency to depression Thomas worked unstintingly as a reviewer and wrote and published over 30 books between 1897 and 1917.'Adlestrop' was written with four other poems between 7th and 9th June 1915. He enlisted in 1915 at the age of 37 and was called to the Front in 1917. He arrived at Arras on 9th February 1917 and was killed on the 9th April Easter Monday by a shell blast in the opening minutes of the offensive.This work for Soprano and Piano is set to the text of Edward Thomas.