Clare Competition Winner 31st March 2014       In recent years the choirs of All Saints have become renowned for their yearly commissions, with works written for the choirs by composers including Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Jonathan Dove, Michael Finnissy and James MacMillan. In 2014 the Friends of All Saints’ Music decided to mark the sesquicentennial anniversary of the death of the poet John Clare, who penned many of his poems on the Portico at All Saints, with a composition competition, and solicited the support of the John Clare Society. Composers were invited to submit works setting one of two texts God looks on nature with a glorious eye and Know God is everywhere. The panel of Lee Dunleavy, Director of Music at All Saints, David McConkey, Parish Priest at All Saints and a music graduate of Yale University, and Bruce Neswick, former Director of Music of the   Cathedral of St John the Divine New York and Professor of Music at Indiana University, worked through all forty-nine anonymously submitted compositions (from eight countries). Their unanimous decision was to award the prize to Ivan Božičević of Croatia for his setting of God looks on nature with a glorious eye. Ivan Božičević is a composer, organist, pianist, arranger, and jazz musician. He studied composition at the Belgrade Faculty of Music, and organ at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. His compositions include three symphonies and orchestral, chamber, and choral works, as well as numerous electronic compositions. It was also the will of the panel to give an honourable mention to Janet Wheeler’s setting of Know God is everywhere. Janet Wheeler is a freelance composer, choral conductor and teacher based in and around Saffron Walden (UK), who has already set poems of Clare in her fifteen-minute choral cycle, Time becomes a song. Božičević’s winning composition will  receive its first performance at the service of Choral Evensong marking the sesquicentennial of Clare’s death on Sunday 18 May 2014 at 6:00pm sung by the Boys and Men of All Saints Northampton.