About

About Me
Rilla was born with a good ear for music and always enjoyed singing. She learned to play the piano, but her ability remained at an elementary level; she joined her secondary school choir and became an experienced choral singer thereafter.
She started writing poems and songs for fun in the 1980s, mostly light-hearted doggerel as “party pieces” for family gatherings and social occasions, using well-known tunes to accompany them, but she started to write original material in 1990 on acquiring an Acorn computer, a tone generator and a music notation program. These digital tools proved to be great liberators, since the ability to play musical instruments with skill was no longer required.
In 1991, having been inspired by the BBC series and book “Where on Earth are we Going?” by Jonathon Porritt, she wrote an environmental musical play for the junior school attended by her two children, because children remember songs better than what they read. This play, “Child of the Future”, enjoyed several public performances in the locality, and, as a result of an article in an overseas magazine, a professional recording of the songs on cassette tape travelled to every continent. The music files became obsolete, but were updated in 2016 and made available free of charge via the website:
https://www.childofthefuture.com
Further details about this musical can also be found on the Compositions tab.
Rilla’s family urged her to “do something” with her other songs, most of which dated from the 1990s. During the Lockdown, and by now a grandmother of four, she took the opportunity to complete the songs and update the files. Some of these can be viewed free on YouTube. The audio files of all her works can be downloaded from Rilla’s page on the song-writers’ site Bandcamp (see Links tab). The “Three Christmas Camels” have been published as children’s picture books, with audio and video accompaniments accessed with QR codes. All three of these are available now – see the Compositions page for more details.