Sinfonietta Accademica

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.