During my mountain and wilderness walking in the Scottish Highlands there have been two distinct and in my view largely incompatible main groups of musical images working in my mind. One gave rise to the 4th Symphony, and is largely of a rather severe and elemental nature. This work uses the other set -- of a lyrical and at times nostalgic cast. This is not a simple 'straight' set of variations on a single theme, however, and is really something of a halfway house between the traditional 'variations' form and my organically developing type of symphony.
The work is expanded (in 1996) from a long flute solo I wrote in 1979, and incorporates some further ideas that came to me in 1980. In fact it contains not one but several themes which repeatedly recur as variations, though pride of place goes to the opening theme, which thus acts as a 'glue', maintaining continuity throughout the work. In addition, although certain of the variations are discrete with a clear beginning and end, many of them are to greater or lesser degree run together, and some are broken up and combined with other variations of the same or a different theme. A few quotations from other composers' works have insinuated themselves into the structure -- two definite quotations from Mozart's Requiem and one from Beethoven's Violin Concerto, and less precise allusions to moments in Verdi's Requiem and Sibelius' 6th Symphony. Why? All I'll say is that it worked out that way. However, the listener will not find here the cheap and empty polystyly that is so fashionable in many works of contemporary music.
Also more like one of my symphonies than a traditional set of variations is the sense of travelling on a big journey, which starts in pastoral vein, taking us past hill slopes with cattle and sheep peacefully grazing, then wanders across remote moorlands and among towering mountains, with tremendous storms and moments of quasi-religious ecstasy together with many a little touch of humour along the way. A humorous touch is the little argument between instrument groups over some inconsequentiality just before the final climax, in which different groups each seek to impose their own views on the rest, the cor anglais being employed for its whining, sneering tone. One particular type of figuration which recurs several times in the latter half of the work is very suggestive of the tumbling and bouncing of falling stones and rocks on the mountains. And at the end, all the wonder, nobility and excitement dies down to the final distant intonation of requiem aeternam.