Orchestra (Orchestra)
SKU: HL.14008415
Composed by Sir Peter
Maxwell Davies. Music
Sales America. Post-1900.
Sheet Music, Miniature
Score. With Text
language: English. 110
pages. Chester Music
#CH55687. Published by
Chester Music
(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.
