Photograph © Bill Carslake (Cairngorms 2018)
Listen here to the premiere given by Farnborough Symphony Orchestra in 2022, recorded by Haresh Patel. Perusal score €20. Hire score & parts by negotiation. 2222; 4200; timp; strings. Three movements, total 20 mins. Movements 1& 2 can be performed separately or as a pair.
A Finzi Scholarship project. Inspired by two solo camping trips looking for Mountain Hares in the Cairngorm mountain range, Scotland. Bill also wrote a travel essay, Composing with Hares (see extract below).
Over the course of his two trips, Bill connected with these elusive animals. He also saw golden eagle and red deer. Mountain Hare is inspired by the land, the movements of the hares themselves and his experiences in this large subarctic area. Movement II, in particular, reacts to the power of the wind.
Note about hares. The Mountain Hare, Lepus timidus, is a survivor from the last ice age. It is related to Arctic and Greenland hares. There are isolated Mountain Hare communities in the Alps, Ireland and Scotland – each genetically distinct. The Brown Hare, Lepus europaeus, arrived in Ireland and the UK thousands of years later.
Extract from Composing with Hares:
It was a hare encounter in Ireland that tipped me into composing something. Mount Shehy, Cork, on a blue-skied day in July. From the top, the sparkling western coastline with its endless diamond inlets stretching south and north from Bantry Bay. Inland, the tightly packed fields competed with hedges for green luminosity. As I descended the lip of the ridge into the heathery seclusion of the mountain range, I disturbed two large, russet-gold forms. They rose up, side-by-side, as if glued. Remaining like this, they pushed at speed through the vegetation — I could hear their flanks flushing the heather and grass. They stayed in tandem, as if sewn together; then turned, in formation, doubled back, and soared up the hill, splitting just before the skyline: two vanishers in a rim of light.
The Shehy range takes its name from the Irish, Cnoic na Seithe, meaning ‘Hills of the Animal Hides’. Perhaps the mountains are used to ‘Indicating, by no Muscle – / The Experience’ (Emily Dickinson, Bloom on the Mountain—Stated) but this was new to me. These were clearly foxes… no, huge hares… no, foxes. I had to challenge my eyes with the long ears and short tails. Only as they disappeared into the sky did I realise I had seen the fabled Golden Hare. If I had been a hunter, their strategy would have confused me and saved at least one life. As it was, the duet played with my mind.
More extracts here.
More Fieldwork Pieces
Circus
Carrownagappul (2024)
