"Magdalen Bells" a song set to words by John Betjeman

This song was written during a long train journey to Durham.
When it was finished I sent a copy and a cassette tape to John Betjeman's house in London and was very pleased to receive the reply shown.

In 1984 the song was entered for the Wantage Music Festival in the composition section. It was at the time rather badly sung by the entrant, but it won the class. It was very well played on the piano by the adjudicator Richard Dearing. His comments were:

I liked the very "English" quality of the writing - Vaughan Williams in inflection. This suited the mood of the words perfectly, and the atmosphere was captured with an economical use of notes. I wondered if the texture and the regular rhythmic figure of each phrase could be more varied. A little colouring would assist in the charactisation with a varied character for each verse. Some of the poetic lines could be conceived more as one breath - with more reference to the puctuation. A less trophic approach would have suited the text better.

It was also entered in 1995 for a Magdalen Arts class and managed to win. On 17/6/95 it was sung by the college choir, and I won an engraved dish.

"The original manuscript"