The following text comprises Tom Phillips' introductory remarks preceding the July 2006 Royal Acedemy revival performance of the Holywell Music Rooms Concert. The original concert, staged 8th March 2006 in Oxford, served as the final lecture of Tom's Slade Professorship.

Early this year I briefly gloried in the title Slade Professor of Art at the University of Oxford which being translated meant give eight lectures and don't cause trouble. I opened each lecture with a snatch of unaccompanied song (Schubert, Spoliansky, Wagner, Satie, Mozart and one of my own) and made the final lecture (not without controversy) an annotated concert at the Holywell Music Rooms.

I asked my composer friends if they would each write a very short piece based in some way upon my work or using texts of mine. None said no. As a result the concert became an intriguing workshop of as yet unperformed pieces. All eleven of their compositions receive official world premières this evening. The Composers' Ensemble was the natural choice of group to perform, since it was for Mary Wiegold and those musicians that I wrote my last two pieces. It was in fact at their instigation that I started writing music again after fourteen years of well-received silence. Mine is the only shop-worn item in the programme since the distraction of orchestrating the lectures themselves took up all my energy at the time.

The sole exception to the limitation of writing for or adapting to the line up of the Composers' Ensemble was in the case of Harrison Birtwistle. He had generously provided a setting of Song of Myself for my sixtieth birthday which was performed at Dulwich Picture Gallery. I asked him if we could do a repeat of this. He searched for the manuscript but could not find it and decided to write a completely new version, luckily incorporating a lot of the revisions I had made to the text.

It is not entirely a coincidence that three of the exhibits in the RA's Summer Exhibition relate to pieces being performed. The lithograph Voices in the Large Weston Room derives from the cover I designed for Tarik O'Regan's recent CD of choral works. In the same room is a print of a fragment from A Humument, the source book which has supplied the words for many of the songs. Gallery X features a silver sculpture which mutely performs the text of Harrison Birtwistle's composition.

My thanks to the composers who went about their work as artists do, and to Mary Weigold and the ensemble for their usual flair in performing a wide variety of works with insight and sympathy. Events like this do not happen without labour and subsidy. As the original studio concert in Oxford was made possible with the support of Oxford Contemporary Music and Sir David Scholey, so for tonight's revival the Park Lane Group joins forces with the Royal Academy to bring it to a wider audience.

Tom Phillips, exclusive to tomphillips.co.uk