Seven Skies of Winter

Seven Skies of Winter - scored for flute, oboe, horn, violin, bassoon and double bass - was first performed by the Nash Ensemble at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney last year. “As in ‘real’ Orkney skies,” the composer writes, “there is hardly any hard-edged division between sections: the work is in one continuous movement.” Based on the plainsong Dum Complerentur Dies Pentecostes - “dealing,” he says, “with the descent of the Holy Spirit in tongues of fire among the disciples” - it is one of several works composed round the Pentecostal Mass he wrote for Westminster Cathedral. “Sometimes,” he explains, “the overwhelming nature of the experience of flaming winter skies, as when a low white sun irradiates fulminant cloud, or simply under a canopy of northern lights, suggests to me an echo of the intensity of the primal Pentecostal experience. I have tried to give each player rewarding solos, and to devise harmonic patterns at times taking on a luminosity, as it were, from deep inside the group. I attempted to fulfil this aim in part by selecting transformation patterns (through a magic square) which naturally generate the most suitable intervals.” Seven Skies is dedicated to the memory of Ian McInnes, the late Stromness painter, probably best known for his Orkney landscapes.