The Colinton Orchestra gave a fantastic performance of my piece on 8 May to a near-capacity audience. I was really impressed with the results of their hard work over several months, their focus and concentration, their interpretation of the music, and their approach to new playing techniques. So, a huge THANK YOU to everyone involved: players, organisers, supporters, Hector, and Lynda.

Below are extracts from my programme note:

My idea for the piece from quite early on in the process was to focus on something that both the orchestra and I have in common, and to create a piece of music that somehow related to the local area, or was site-specific. I decided that walks (taken by the players in the orchestra) were a good starting point. A questionnaire asked the players to describe a walk they enjoyed in the surrounding area, and one of the questions asked them to draw the line of the walk from memory. The questionnaire responses provided me with the raw materials for the piece: I used the maps they’d drawn to create melodic shapes, and the players’ thoughts on walking gave me ideas for the characterisation of the music and for the titles of each ‘chapter’ (or movement) in the piece.

Chapter One, entitled Woven footsteps is mainly concerned with texture – a texture inspired by the sound of footsteps in a busy street (unsynchronised, percussive, varied in timbre). Some of the players wrote about city walks (or walks that began in a busy city and led to a rural location), so this was my starting point for the first movement. I wanted to reflect the idea of people taking their own independent walks in the way that I wrote the music. It is scored in five-second ‘bars’ and the players play their note(s) where they judge them to be within that timeframe. This way of writing the music means that all the players play at different times, and in effect take their own path or walk through the movement. The texture is continually shifting: instruments enter and drop out, different techniques are used, and there are gradual changes e.g. from very short, dry percussive notes, to longer, more resonant ones. One way of thinking about this is that the orchestra is moving through changing terrain.

Chapter Two – Industrial Ghosts. This movement was influenced by one of the orchestra questionnaires that described a walk along the Union canal in Colinton and drew attention to the remnants of an industrial past. I liked the idea of creating sounds that were somehow suggestive of rusting metal. To achieve this, I ask some of the players (particularly the strings) to play their instruments in quite unconventional ways. I spent some time introducing lots of new playing techniques to the orchestra, which I did by describing the sounds and by demonstrating on a violin. The texture from the first chapter recurs sporadically as a reminder of the activity that once took place in the area.

Chapter Three – Expanding sky - is inhabited by a slowly-rotating chord that I created from a map of a hill walk taken by one of the players. The chord is passed between strings and wind and orchestrated differently each time. I wanted to create a feeling of opening outwards and this movement is a response to several comments in the questionnaires about the striking views of the Scottish countryside that may be encountered when walking.

Chapter Four – A quick scramble is a short, fast reference to the material from the first movement and keeps the players on their toes!

Chapter Five – Air. Many of the sounds in this final movement are breath-like and other sounds emerge from and recede to an airy backdrop.
A point of repose      Altitude                      Solitude