Symphony No. 1 (Sagarmatha)

My 'Condensed Eroica' symphony…

This symphony derived initially from a sketch I wrote in 1978 in the form of a flute duet, which lacked both the slow introduction and the whole final movement of the symphonic work that we have now. A non-standard item in the work's scoring is the use of a tubular bell sounding the B-flat just below the normal range — though if this isn't available the tubular bell an octave higher should be sounded, doubled with piano at the required pitch.

But for Beethoven having already named a rather distinguished symphony Eroica, in fact the latter or something very similar would have been my chosen title for this symphony. Instead I turned to an image that had haunted me since I wrote my novel Three Blind Executioners (Betrayal and Crucifixion of Climber on Mount Everest Just 174 Metres Short of the Summit, Without Oxygen). Sagarmatha is the Nepalese name for Mount Everest.

The 4 Movements (played without a break)

A slow atmospheric introduction is constructed from the two motifs that form the backbone of the symphony's structure. Here they're in their condensed form. Appearing in ghostly fashion as though out of a Dartmoor mist, an almost waltz-like theme in 6/8 starts the 'action', presented in an unsettling bitonality. It sounds uneasy and awkward, as though not knowing what it is or where it's really needing to head for.

Almost at once a disturbing 4-note motif (lifted from Vagn Holmboe's epic 8th Symphony) further disrupts any sense of underlying tonality and brings the 6/8 tune down to a lower key which in this context bears a feeling of defeat. The tune won't lie down and die, however, and a search starts, the tune completely changing its identity as it passes into a wandering line of quavers in 3/4 and then 4/4, a change of key warming up the atmosphere and giving at least a hint that all isn't lost.

After a brief heroic section the search enters a more mysterious, tonally ambiguous area, coloured by menace from the octatonic scale, in which it comes to a full stop against a granitic cliff of descending overlapping fourths and fifths, which steadfastly resists attempts at further progress.

Dance this may be, but the mood is quite melancholic. Part-way through, a brief impassioned outburst uses a phrase which could be a distant memory of a moment in Leoš Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. In this movement the granitic cliff persists as fragments of melody in the dance, which in its central section introduces the ostinato and a variant of the melody of the next movement, and it's in the middle of this that the aforementioned outburst occurs. Against a gentle slow minor-sounding 4-note ostinato (a crystallized version of one of the symphony's opening motifs) a sad melody on piccolo wanders, seemingly talking quietly to itself of bygone times among a canonic treatment of that same melody murmuring in the orchestra. But the final bars bring in a return to the brighter tonality of the beginning of the work.

This is the longest movement of the work. The searching and heroic motifs from the first movement return, ushering in an extended development that brings in other ideas from earlier in the work, now appearing transformed. At one point the orchestra gets carried away — perhaps a little drunk — and the instruments all play the heroic motifs upside down, getting increasingly rowdy and out-of-key with each other. Second thoughts, no, it's not drink; it must be a bit of the naughty weed, for the chaos is cut with a moonlit interlude of too rapturous a beauty to have been experienced by drunken minds. The rowdyism resumes, but soon the trombones and then trumpets silence this bedlam, hammering out the key motif the right way up (Margaret Thatcher fashion), but it's left to a 'Still Small Voice' in the woodwind to show how beautiful it really is.

A final recapitulation is multitudinous in character, pitting the overlapping fourths of the 'mist' that opened the symphony against the ostinato from the 3rd movement, which is now transformed from deeply melancholic to a positive surge rising from the depths, accompanied by bell-like declamations of a low B in the brass and syncopated repeating motifs from the second movement. Excitement builds up to the final 'cliff' of descending fourths and fifths, its reappearance this time being transformed into a celebratory eruption, giving a sense of fulfilment rather than obstruction.

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Related works

• Symphony 4 (Highland Wilderness)

• Symphony 6 (K2 — A Song of Striving and Adventure)

• Music From the Mountain Waters

• Mount Everest — Summit Bid

• Fantasy Variations — From the Scottish Mountains (note that this is in a significantly different idiom / mindset as compared with any of my other works)

• Clarity of a Mountain Sunrise

• Sunrise on Ama Dablam