Symphony No. 4 (Highland Wilderness)

A nature symphony partly based on memories and lonely longings gathered from real Highland ghosts…

For many years I 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's not 'Scottish' music as usually understood, but embodies one particular Englishman's experiences of remote solitude and adventure in the Highlands. Although some elements of the music have a descriptive effect, the work was composed, and is intended, to be listened to as 'absolute' music.

If this Symphony 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 and descriptions, therefore, while potentially helpful for many, are far from essential.

However, because of my more recent orthodoxy-busting insights into the origin of many elements of the music, I suggest that anyone who sets the movement titles and descriptions completely aside would be missing out on a deeper understanding that potentially would greatly enrich their experience of this symphony, as well as giving them a deeper understanding of other music and indeed of the life experience itself. Listening just to 'feel something' is much less rewarding than listening to 'experience and learn useful things from that experience'.

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's not sounding explicitly it's usually still implicit in the music, or occasionally it may be in a higher or lower octave than normal. I assumed for many years that this drone had nothing to do with bagpipes*, and in any case it was emphatically not a clever device I'd put into the music to be 'different'. It's an intrinsic part of the music that seemed to emanate from the land and resonated within me out there in the wilds. It's 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 put at the bottom of the interval of a minor seventh, 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 that movement its remarkable brooding atmosphere.

I should explain that I almost never thought to take a tuning fork out with me, with a notebook, so that I could take a note of the actual pitch of the drone, and of other motifs that came to me particularly strongly (including the cuckoos). I'd really needed to do those spot checks a few to several times on each walk, so I could see how consistent any 'heard' musical sound was in pitch, and make some effort to include musical elements in my works at genuinely originally-heard pitches — which could make quite a difference to their effects on the listener.

The one time I did take a tuning fork with me was my final trip to Fort William, in 1999, and even then I was negligent and didn't take it out on my hikes. I simply checked the pitch of one cuckoo I heard from my bedroom window, and of the drone as I was hearing it there in my B&B after my day's hiking. I might well have unawarely altered the drone pitch once away from the mountains, so actually I was little the wiser! What a confounded pity, what a wasted opportunity!

For this reason, the exact pitch of the drone and other musical elements as played out in this symphony cannot be related to the original 'heard' pitches. Basically I treated the G# drone as the symphony's pitch base-line upon which the whole work revolved. I did try transposing the first movement down a tone to fit with the pitch of the one cuckoo I pitch-tested, but it didn't sound right at all like that. So I compromised as described below — and that actually worked really well musically, giving a little push to the gradually building tension.

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 isn't 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 an other-worldly representation of three cuckoos answering each other in a remote glen. The first is singing the interval of a major third starting on E, at the actual pitch I observed a cuckoo singing at in the Highlands.

The other two add successive minor thirds below that, establishing the half-diminished seventh 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 seventh, 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.

On listening to the Symphony, note the enormous difference between the emotional effect of the cuckoos that open this movement, and that of the cuckoos opening the final movement, and ponder what might underlie that difference!

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

Rubbing shoulders with mourners and pallbearers of ancient times…

The body (sic) 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's this movement that uses the wordless choir. An enigmatic church bell tolling immediately re-establishes the minor seventh and the half-diminished seventh chord, now used melodically, 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.

That marks the start of the central section, which I've become still more thrilled by and about since my working out in 2021 what its main ideas are really derived from and depicting. As far as I can work out, the basis of this section (still cut here and there by recurrences of the imposing mountain theme), is a pallbearers' lament-song (or indeed chant) that I heard in my mind intriguingly strongly at one location, no, not in Scotland at all, but on Dartmoor, south-west England, in c.1982.

At that time I had no idea of its nature or origin, but it's clear to me now that I'd come across a ghost there, which was carrying a memory of a group of pallbearers singing a lament on their way over the Moor with a body to be buried at Lydford Church — and no doubt it would have carried other impressions too. I experienced this alongside a well-known pallbearers' route on Dartmoor called the Lich Way.

Although a Scottish Highlands equivalent would have been more appropriate 'politically' for this symphony, this particular lament-song keys in most beautifully in this Highlands context. In any case as soon as we've heard the first two phrases sung by the men (which is all of the song that I can be reasonably sure is 'genuine original'), the fantasy-improvisation on that song commences, bringing in the women too, and taking attention out of the pain of the mourners / pallbearers into a more joyful, even ecstatic awareness of the landscape and our plodding but now light-hearted rhythm — even with a haunting hint of the Sirènes from Debussy's Nocturnes.

Finally the original folk-like theme returns, followed by the bell that commenced the movement re-emerges and soon fades away into the distance.

Summary plan of the movement:

3. Alone across Rannoch Moor to Ben Alder

Rannoch Moor is a very special place indeed, and it has evoked very special music to match. This music, the product of some of the remotest and most serious hikes I have undertaken, forms the culmination of the symphony, for which movements 1 and 2 could now perhaps be seen as preludes, delving progressively deeper into the mysterious historical impressions.

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's permeated by the diminished seventh — a chord of three minor thirds (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 more prominently with the tritone — that is, additional to the tritones already spanned by the two diminished triads contained within the diminished seventh.

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. In fact it's derived from the demonic ostinato motif that commences Prokofiev's terrifying third 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, to produce a story sequence that is somehow intriguingly meaningful, but I can point to the existence of three contrasting groups of melodic material, as follows:

About a third 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 mysterious bird, which I never actually saw, was flying to and fro over this end of the loch, uttering other-worldly rather menacing low trills (more like a strong and rapid vibrato) as it did so. I've subsequently identified the sound as that of the 'drumming' of a snipe. However, in the music those trills, especially when at rather higher pitches, are also suggestive of curlews, which actually I don't remember hearing in the Rannoch Moor area, but which I heard a lot over Loch Linnhe, by Fort William.

The 'action' of the movement culminates in a passage of what may appear superficially to be 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 apparently 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 could be seen as relating 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 actually to 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!

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Related works

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

• Symphony 1 (Sagarmatha)

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

• Music From the Mountain Waters

• Mount Everest — Summit Bid

• Clarity of a Mountain Sunrise

• Sunrise on Ama Dablam