Outstanding Works Collection

Cecilia McDowall

For the UK – a nation of choirs and choral singers – Cecilia McDowall is one of its foremost and most admired composers. Although she has written major instrumental works, including for the City of London Sinfonia and Welsh Chamber Orchestra, the human voice is never far from her music, and her large output includes sacred works for Durham, Liverpool, Westminster and St Paul’s Cathedrals, as well as works for professional, amateur and children’s choirs alike.

Her music also engages with secular themes; whether the diaries and letters of Scott of the Antarctic (Seventy Degrees Below Zero, 2012), the inscrutable poetry of the sea areas around the British Isles in The Shipping Forecast (2012) or Harriet Quimby’s pioneering flight across the English Channel of 1912 (Night Flight, 2014, for which she won the Choral category of the British Composer Awards). In these works she often collaborates with the poets Kevin Crossley-Holland and Seán Street.

Often sacred and secular are combined, as in her insertion of Psalm 107 ‘They that go down to the sea in ships’ into The Shipping Forecast, or her most recent major work, Da Vinci Requiem (2019), in which extracts from the notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci cast new light on the words of the Requiem Mass.

The theme of heroic travel is one to which McDowall often returns and is most fully realised in her 2018 cantata Everyday Wonders: The Girl from Aleppo, a retelling for choirs, violin and piano of the story of Nujeen Mustafa, the Kurdish teenager who in 2014–15 travelled 3,500 miles in a wheelchair from Aleppo to Germany to escape the Syrian Civil War. Other recurring influences on her music include the landscape and weather of Scotland, northern Europe and the polar icecaps, and the poetry of Shakespeare.

Cecilia McDowall’s compositional legacy is exceptional and today that is recognised with an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collection.

TIM RUTHERFORD-JOHNSON