The British composer Judith Bingham was for several years a member of the BBC Singers and before that the Symphony Chorus, so it is not surprising that choral music makes up a major part of her compositional output. Salt in the Blood is a ghost story based on the legend of a fatal quarrel between two Norwegian sailors over who was the better dancer. Four traditional sea shanties form the backbone of the music, and its text draws from fragments of ships’ log books, the Beaufort Scale, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. A 2004 BBC Proms commission, The Secret Garden is a magical and intriguing piece in which Bingham imagines what the Garden of Eden was like after Adam and Eve’s expulsion, and whose central image is the extraordinary synergy that exists between plants and insects. In 2006 Judith Bingham won the British Composer Award for choral music.