The same year he was awarded the Esposito Cup at the Feis Ceoil and as a result of this, he was nominated as the first recipient of a new scholarship prize worth £100 to be spent on the further study of piano.
In September he enrolled at the Royal College of Music where his teachers included Charles Kitson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, R. O. Morris and Gordon Jacob.
[4] On 17 March 1933, there was a first orchestral run-through of May's Scherzo for orchestra, and it received its first public performance on 1 December when it was heard as part of the Patron's Concert.
This was followed by the Symphonic Ballad (1937), the Suite of Irish Airs (1937), Spring Nocturne (1938), Songs from Prison (1941) and the Lyric Movement for Strings (1942).
May effectively ceased original composition at this point, the major exception being his late orchestral work Sunlight and Shadow, which was premiered in January 1956.
[15] The first performance of his Songs From Prison, a setting for baritone and orchestra of poems by Ernst Toller and Erich Stadlen, was broadcast on BBC Radio in December 1942.
For fellow composer Arthur Duff, the work demonstrated that May was "more a follower of Mahler and Berg than a successor to (Charles Villiers) Stanford and (Hamilton) Harty".
This was the nine-minute orchestral piece Sunlight and Shadows, given its first performance on 22 January 1956 by the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre.