SYMPHONY No. 4
(Highland Wilderness)

For many years I have had an annual spring visit to the Scottish Highlands. This symphony is composed from some of the music that haunted and pursued me each year as I walked alone over mountains and remote moor. It is not 'Scottish' music, but embodies one particular Englishman's response to remote solitude and adventure in the Highlands. Although some elements of the music have a descriptive effect, the work was composed and should be listened to as 'absolute' music. If it additionally inspires in anyone some new experience of the Scottish Highlands or indeed wilderness areas in general, then that would be a bonus. The movement titles, therefore, are quite non-essential.

The symphony is very unusual in that it has a (normally quiet) drone, which is present, on and off, for most of the work; even when it is not sounding explicitly it is usually still implicit in the music, or occasionally it may be in a higher or lower octave than normal. On the face of it this drone has nothing to do with bagpipes and is emphatically not a clever device I've put into the music to be 'different'. It is an intrinsic part of the music that emanated from the land and resonated within me out there in the wilds. It is not an idle tinnitus but the hum of a veritable dynamo from which musical ideas erupt bristling with electricity.

The basic drone - a low G# - is the bottom of the interval of a minor 7th, which latter permeates the first movement and parts of the second. In the final movement the G# drone is also the top of a tritone, which helps give this movement its remarkable brooding atmosphere.

The 3 Movements

1. Springtime in Knoydart

Like the final movement, this one is a crucible into which a series of related motifs are boiled together to produce new ones. Thus its overall form is not easily described, for its shape is defined by development and growth of the various ideas. The symphony opens with the drone marked on the timpani and three cuckoos answering each other in a remote glen. The first is singing the interval of a major 3rd starting on E, at the actual pitch I observed a cuckoo singing at in the Highlands. The other two add successive minor 3rds below that, establishing the chord which is to permeate the movement and to a large extent the whole symphony. After a few bars the cuckoo calls rise by a whole tone so that the bottom note of their chord is G# and therefore underpinned by the drone. The chord spans a minor 7th, and this interval is never long out of earshot. Out of this dynamo strange modal melodies and harmonies emerge, evoking something of the dramatic and mysterious character of this wild and craggy mountainous landscape with its phantasms and strange bird calls over the lochs - and surely towards the end we hear a hint of the ferry boat taking another group of hikers across a shimmering loch for a remote mountain adventure.

As to what is an authentic interval for a cuckoo simulation to be sounding, I have heard cuckoos singing anything from a major second (a whole tone) to a perfect fourth - though the major third appears to be commonest, closedly followed by the minor third.

2. A long walk from a small town, over mountain and moor

The body of this movement has a simpler, more immediate and folk-like quality as a necessary contrast with the severity of the outer movements, and it is this movement that uses the wordless choir. An enigmatic church bell tolling immediately re-establishes the minor 7th, but then the drone loses the F# and, against an ostinato in the strings, a celebratory folk-like melodic improvisation emerges. After a brief climax it dies away in the distance, and the severity of the minor seventh is back with us in the form of an imposing arched theme for strings and brass, suggestive of a towering rugged mountain.

After that has come to earth, the ostinato from the folk-like idea reappears, but this time a quite different and more serious folk-like improvisation starts, but is cut off by a grander re-emergence of the 'mountain' theme. When that has subsided the folk-like improvisation resumes, with some remarkably singable moments, and it is mostly in this section that the wordless choir is heard.

An interesting observation is that the 6/8 pulse of this central section, which seems to reflect the long walk of the movement's title, is much slower than my normal walking pace. I found that in fact it precisely matches my pace during steep mountain ascents.

Eventually the mountain theme breaks in again, but this time in combination with part of the folk-like improvisation, the awesome effect of this combination sounding like a full organ, though there is definitely no organ playing.

Finally the first folk-like theme returns, and the bell which commenced the movement re-emerges and fades away into the distance.

Summary plan of the movement:

3. Alone across Rannoch Moor to Ben Alder

This movement is the longest, most weighty and highly charged of the three. It has a colour and mood very much of its own, for it is permeated by the diminished triad - a chord of three minor 3rds (underpinned as always by the G# drone), and at the same time the drone often incorporates the D below, so colouring parts of the movement with the tritone.

After a slow introduction that evokes not only a huge space but seems to speak of great human dramas of bygone times, the 'action' starts with a wild - almost ferocious - idea in 6/8. It is in fact derived from the demonic ostinato motif that commences Prokofiev's terrifying 3rd Symphony.

It would be too confusing for me to attempt here a description of the movement's structure, which has been worked out intuitively and not to any traditional design, but I can point to the existence of three contrasting groups of melodic material, as follows:

About ¹/₃ into the movement is a strange quasi-static passage lasting just over a minute, heralded by a chord in string harmonics and marked by a repeated mysterious trill motif on mostly low woodwind (actually a variant of one of the tormented motifs). This was inspired by a 2½-hour wait for the evening train at Rannoch station after my having once again walked from Corrour station via Ben Alder in a day. I was alone, with nobody in sight, and gazing down Loch Laidon towards the distant Glencoe mountains as the sun gradually sank. A bird, which I never actually saw, was flying to and fro over this end of the loch, uttering other-worldly rather menacing low trills as it did so.

The 'action' of the movement culminates in a passage of blazing glory, embodying a transfigured version of the 'ferryboat' theme from near the end of the first movement combined into a multiple-canonic rendering of the illustrated descending chordal sequence. This brings the body of the symphony to an emphatic close, leaving us with a fading image of that transcendent vision, which subsides into the echoes of the moor and those cuckoos in the glens, which in turn fade away into the distance, leaving just the drone, like some deep unrequited longing for something 'beyond'. Individual humans live, do great deeds (sometimes) and die, but the wilderness goes on for much, much longer!

 In summary - Nature painting apart, to me this symphony relates a process of self discovery, in which one explores progressively more deeply into areas of one's experience where reside elements that are greatly troublesome and disturbing, and where the average person would be frightened to look. By getting into harmony and practical engagement with a wild, rugged, inspiring and ennobling landscape, it's possible, often for the first time, to gain the sense of safety and the mental clarity to look at those disturbing elements within and observe the interactions and conflicts of these phantasms, so putting oneself in a much better position to actually go about clearing out or 'exorcising' those old bogeys sometime hence.

 The symphony's first movement is elemental, unpeopled except for detached glimpses of the incursion of a small party of adventurers. In the second movement we take the viewpoint of one who wanders great distances and to great heights in the wilderness. But the third movement goes deeper, and it's here in particular that the most troublesome phantasms, deep in human consciousness, act out some powerful seemingly historical drama, before one's attention comes back to the simple 'here and now' of the wilderness. Yet the persistence of that quiet drone to the end seems to be saying "Yes, but there's still 'unfinished business' for you to attend to there, and it's not going to go away until you actually resolve it!"

From the evening train at Corrour in early April; Ben Alder is the snowy hulk some 10 miles away, on the right side of the prominent pass on the skyline (Bealach Dubh). The pool to the right is not Loch Ossian, which is actually ahead but just hidden.