During the current academic year, the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University is Tom Phillips. The main public duty of the Slade professor is to give a series of lectures, and Phillips planned his course to reflect as many facets of his artistic life as possible. Alongside his career as a painter, Phillips was a member of the Scratch Orchestra in the 1970s, as well as a composer and librettist. So he conceived the last of his Slade lectures as a concert, in which the soprano Mary Wiegold and baritone Omar Ebrahim, along with the Composers Ensemble conducted by Peter Wiegold, gave the first performance of a collection of songs Phillips had commissioned for the occasion.

Twelve composers were involved, including Phillips himself, though his was the only song that was not new; he described his Mine Is the Life Song as an evocation of the long-gone world of Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth. The stylistic range of the contributions was huge. There was the simple and effective Running Away by Brian Eno (a one-time pupil of Phillips), with its pre-recorded synthesizer and percussion underpinning a memorable refrain; Howard Skempton's exquisite Think of the Dark, Webernesque in its brevity; and the pastoral effusion of Robin Holloway's A Page From a Humument, setting the text from one page of Phillips's treatment of a Victorian novel that has been a career-long work in progress.

Michael Nyman contributed an almost folk-like lament with drones and a keening viola solo, while Harrison Birtwistle's Song of Myself was a recomposition, for double bass, drum and a baritone playing a guiro, of a setting of a Phillips text he had first made for the artist's 60th birthday, but which had since gone missing. And Tarik O'Regan gave a sample of a collaboration still to be finished, with three extracts from an opera he is writing to a libretto by Phillips based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness - tiny fragments only, but enough to suggest that O'Regan has the right dramatic instincts for the job.