It always feels like Christmas when new music lands on my desk, and doubly so this morning with the latest anthology from Shorter House, Sleep, Holy Babe.

Planning choral repertoire for the Christmas season, for me, begins in the summer, looking for repertoire for the University Carol Service in Canterbury Cathedral each December, and this year the Chamber Choir will be working from this collection of contemporary works, a rich anthology containing seasonal lullabies, carols, settings of the Magnificat, and Advent antiphons. The collection includes new setting of favourite seasonal texts, including Lullay my Liking and the Coventry Carol, and features both a cappella and accompanied pieces from a range of contemporary composers. There’s a great versatility to the set, which also includes pieces for upper-voice choir, which makes it particularly appealing – whilst you develop a clear programme for the choral year, it’s always useful to have scope for flexibility in case, as happened this year, the audition choir turns out to be upper-voices rather than SATB.

There’s also some really beautiful music contained in the collection, which I’m hoping will surprise anyone who tends to think that New Music means aggressive dissonance, irrational time-signatures, metric uncertainty and angular lines. These pieces are all singable – care has been taken by the composers to make the music easily performable – without compromising on an arresting musical language or sonorous colours.

Sleep, Holy Babe will be thrust into the hands of the newly-auditioned Chamber Choir in the autumn, and I’m very much looking forward to exploring these new landscapes in time for December. We’ll let you know how we get on…