ABSTRACT
The inclusion of texts and usually (although not always) the use of voices to project those texts has been a recurrent feature of my work. As a composer who also frequently writes about music, this preoccupation with words is perhaps not so surprising; what is unusual is the opportunity to make a comprehensive survey of the texts I have used and to reflect on them, not as an adjunct to my work but as a discrete literature in its own right. It is a literature that runs from Guillaume de Machaut and Dante, through the English translators of the Bible and the Puritan pamphleteers of the Civil War, to William Wordsworth, Edward Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Derek Jarman and, most recently, to living poets such as Ian Duhig. English is the most frequently used language, but French, Italian, German, Dutch, Romanian, Finnish and Catalan are there too, most notably in the polyglot work Catalogue irraisoné.
