Peter Maxwell Davies: Songs Of Hoy Instrumental Parts: Voice: Instrumental Work

SKU: HL.14020986

ISBN 9780711960961. UPC: 884088442330. 9.0x12.0x0.071 inches.

Peter Maxwell Davies wrote this set of six short pieces in 1993 as a gift for a friend (a double bass player and composer from the BBC Philharmonic)who was celebrating the birth of his daughter. Despite the reason for writing them being most 'occasional', these pieces are certainly not lacking in musical substance as one might expect an 'occasional' piece to be. These pieces are ideal works for young performers to introduce them to playing modern music or even as an introduction to the broad range of Maxwell Davies's work.

SKU: HL.14008415

UPC: 884088808242. 8.5x11.0x0.261 inches.

This work, written by Maxwell Davies in 1983 for chamber orchestra, was commissioned to celebrate the quartercentenary of Edinburgh University. The first performance was given by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted by Edward Harper in October 1983. Duration c. 29mins. This work was thought through in outline following a visit to the ruined pre-Reformation church of Hoy in Orkney, on a fine Spring afternoon after Maxwell Davies had played the harmonium for the tiny congregation in its large bleak Victorian replacement. The old church was surrounded by the graves of centuries, the more recent ones with familiar names, largely of people who lived in houses now ruinous - crofters, fishermen, clerics, sea-captains. Next to it stood the chief farmhouse, the Bu, going back to Viking times. He thought of the lives and deaths encompassed there, expressed through hundreds of years of music in the church, and in the big barn of the farm. The plainsongs 'Dies Irae' and 'Victimae Paschali Laudes' are used throughout the work - the first concerning the Day of Judgement, from the Mass for the Dead, the second particular to Easter Sunday and the Resurrection. These are subject to constant transformation - the intervallic contour slowly changes from one into the other, and their notes are made to dance through Renaissance astrological 'magic square' patterns. The orchestra consists of double woodwind, two horns, two trumpets and strings.

SKU: HL.14020989

ISBN 9780711952027. 9.0x12.0x0.433 inches.

The solo group consists of a sextet of the woodwind instruments which are normally doubled with more regular members of the orchestra: these six strangers, now brought to the fore, are piccolo, alto flute, cor anglais, clarinet in Eb, bass clarinet in Bb and contrabassoon. They make a motley group, diverse in colour as in register, and one of the tasks of the piece sets itself is to have them blend and cohere, both together as an ensemble and in partnership with the string orchestra (which itself is used with unusual variety and subtlety). Another evident task of the work is to provide fine solos for each member of the woodwind sextet: bright dances for the piccolo, recitatives for the alto flute, a stoical song from the contrabassoon in the extreme bass. The work is cast as a single movement, which begins in the composer's first-movement style of rapid regeneration. This is interrupted by slow interventions, including one for divided strings which gives rise to a sextuple cadenza for the soloists. Out of this comes a slow movement, or sequence of short slow movements, followed by a dancing finale with its own slow episodes. Altogether this is music of songs and dances, heavily tinged with Scottish rhythms and tonalities: one might think of a magic bagpipe, having six chanters and a drone of variegated string texture.