Herrmann wanted to write a musical portrait of his friend and colleague Alfred Hitchcok so choose motifs from the movie The Trouble With Harry one of Hitchcockâ??s more personal and humorous films. This single-movement work for Orchestra employs some of the more familiar elements of Herrmannâ??s compositional style: short musical phrases repeated and then repeated again in other positions sharp use of dynamics among them. From the first note the creepiness begins.Bernard Herrmann was among the very greatest of all composers of music for cinema and there are many who avow that he was the greatest of all. A very short list of the films for which this award-winning composercreated soundtracks includes Citizen Kane The Man Who Knew Too Much Vertigo Jason and Argonauts Fahrenheit 451 Obsession and Taxi Driver. He had a long and fertile association with Alfred Hitchcock during the most productive period of Hitchcockâ??s career and with Orson Welles from the time of the Mercury Theatre on the Air. In addition to his conducting and composing work for the entertainment world Herrmann wrote concert pieces including a symphony opera and cantata.

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 EdwardHarper 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 theharmonium 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 thechurch 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 toEaster 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.