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.

Volume 2-Ernest Moeran was the last major representative of the group of English composers who in the first two decades of the twentieth century sought musical inspiration in the melodic beauty of tradtional folksong. All of Moeran's single solo songs most of which have been long out of print or difficult to obtain have been collected together and printed in these five fabulous volumes. Volume Two is a collection of solo pieces for Soprano or Mezzo Soprano with Piano accompaniment.

Salmer Og Aandelige Sange ias a collection of Sacred Songs And Hymns by early 20th Century Danish composer Carl Nielsen who is one of the most important and free-spirited of the generation of composers who straddle the 19th and 20th centuries. If Nielsen's chamber and orchestral music epitomizes the exploratory growth-orientated side of his nature his songs contain the essence of his search for the ‘simple original’. Arranged for Piano Vocal and Guitar.

Composer performer and arranger Richard Rodney Bennett was internationally respected for his serious music and many award-winning film scores (Murder on the Orient Express Nicholas and Alexandra) as well as his works for children and his religious pieces. The playful and sensitive side of Bennett comes to the fore with this delightful setting of five songs of poems by Marjorie Fleming. Marjorie Fleming was a very young Scottish poetess who was born in Kirkcaldy in 1803 and died just eight years later leaving journals and a handful of poems. Her words are artless and evocative her spelling and language inventive. ‘Three Turkeys now their last have breathed And nowthis world forever leaved ’ she writes in A Melancholy Lay.This set of art songs is witty and poignant.