The Midnight Skaters was commissioned in 2009 by the Brighton Youth Orchestra with funding from the Westdene Trust. It was originally intended to be one of three or four orchestral songs with texts associated with Sussex but in the course of setting Edmund Blunden’s poem, the music grew out of all proportion to my original conception and eventually became a piece that needed to stand alone. The poem is superficially a winter landscape (Blunden had close Sussex associations) but beneath the surface, there is imagery that suggests Blunden’s First World War experiences. Above all, the poem is about the omnipresence of death and that, together with the precisely observed description of its setting, provided the direction that my music took. The Midnight Skaters was first performed on May 9th 2010 at St Bartholomew’s Church as part of the main Brighton International Festival by Sir John Tomlinson and the Brighton Youth Orchestra conducted by Andrew Sherwood.