Skye Songs [1]
Skye Songs [1]: seven songs for mezzo-soprano and piano
- we travel
- the quietest point
- if I do not look
- I do not register easily
- touch who is leaving
- my scars burn
- in the rain
The idea of setting my poems for voice and piano originated with my dear friend and composer, Sadie Harrison.
In 2024, I published a substantial collection of poems in Collected Poems Volume 1, issued by Vision Edition. Sadie wrote a very sensitive and insightful foreword to the collection and developed a strong attachment to several of the poems.
She subsequently selected seven poems I had written in 2005 while living on the Isle of Skye and proposed a collaborative project in which we would each set these texts as songs.
The aim was to explore how two composers—one being the author of the poems—might interpret and set the same material for voice and piano. The poems Sadie chose are particularly enigmatic and aphoristic, offering ample scope for musical treatment.
For my settings, published here, I have scored the songs for mezzo-soprano and piano, arranged in the order in which the pieces were composed. However, other sequences would work equally well.
These songs are the first synchronised pieces I have composed for some time. While still atonal, the nature of the material led me to explore expressive possibilities through a calmer and more harmonically overt language than is typical of my usual work.
The songs are dedicated to Sadie.
Duration circa 18 minutes.
