I Lay Down By The Riverside And Dreamed

I Lay Down By The Riverside And Dreamed (2019), for ensemble (fl, ob, clt, bsn, hn, tpt, btrbn, bd, sd, tom-t, wdbl, pno, 2 vn, va, vc, cb), duration 20 minutes, premiered by Glasgow New Music Expedition and directed by Richard Baker on 10 May 2019 at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow. Commissioned by the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

There was a stream running through the garden where we lived. One morning you told me how you had gone to sleep listening to the sounds of the water and dreamed a piece of music about a river as an endlessly evolving melody. It rose on the moors and flowed down through pools, rapids and falls, under bridges, over weirs, past the remains of a mediaeval abbey, into a huge reservoir and out again hundreds of feet below. It hurtled down a steep gorge flanked by ancient oaks, meandered slowly through pastureland and parkland, and by the ruins of mills and forges. Finally it slowed as it entered mudflats and lost its identity where it joined a greater body of water heading for the sea.

You asked me, ‘could you write it?’