The BBC Concert Orchestra has just announced that Guy Barker will be its new Associate Composer for two years beginning in April 2013. The first commission – taking a cue from the Britten Centenary celebration – is to base a composition on a Henry James short story with ghosts that is not either The Turn of the Screw or Owen Wingrave. Barker will base a work on a Henry James The Jolly Corner.

The story does sound ideal for Guy: “He [ Stephen Brydon, the central character] projected himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor’s wand.”