It takes something to ‘trigger’ me to write a composition. I’ve found it easier since the introduction of music software, but in the manuscript days the thought of carrying terabytes of evolving information in my head whilst still having to do the washing up was frankly daunting.

I read that St Paul’s Cathedral was running a competition for an anthem for the Feast of The Baptism of Christ, just after Epiphany, a feast with the misfortune to lie in the shadow of Christmas when choirs are possibly recovering before the journey to Lent. I looked at the texts that were suggested, but they were too cosy for me (or about something else!!) – so read up on the theology and devised a Wordcloud, with the River Jordan snaking down the page to the desert at the bottom – desert? The relevance of Jesus receiving his Father’s gift of the Holy Spirit to empower him before his one-to-one with the devil seems to be a major aspect to me, and I feel frustration where the relevance of Bible stories to the ongoing narrative is neatly excised.

One key factor in an anthem is that you must be able to rehearse it at choir practice in the morning for performance that evening. On that count I totally failed, because what I wanted to portray was too powerful for that constraint, so I wrote what I wanted to express regardless of difficulty – not that I tried to make it difficult, but it is! I wonder if anyone will notice that the tenors sing ‘devil’ to the diabolus in musica interval.

I have devised the covers for all my recent church music and in about 1980 got as close as I dared to the supposed point of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan at a time when the roads were signed with warnings of mines in the context of a skull and crossbones, definitely no photo-opportunities. So the cover view of a transfigured sky above the mountains is in fact a sunset view from La Digue in the Seychelles, with a little help from Photoshop…

Use this link to read the whole My Beloved Son booklet as a PDF.