Photograph © Bill Carslake (Cairngorms 2018)
Listen here to the premiere given by Farnborough Symphony Orchestra on 22 January 2022, recorded by Haresh Patel. Perusal score €20. Hire score and parts by negotiation. For orchestra: 2222; 4200; timp; strings. In three movements, total duration 19 mins. The first and second movements can be performed separately or as a pair. There could also be a version in the pipeline for cl, vln, vc and pno.
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. The second movement 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.
It was a hare encounter in Ireland that tipped me into a piece. Shortly before the Greenland trip, I was up Mount Shehy in Co. Cork on a blue-skied day in July. From the top, I enjoyed the sparkling coastline of diamond inlets, stretching to the south and north past Bantry Bay. Below me, tightly packed green fields competed with hedges for luminous sheen.
I turned to reenter the seclusion of the mountain range. As I descended from the lip, I disturbed two large, russet-gold forms in the heather. They rose up side-by-side as if one, and flowed down the mountain’s pelt – I could hear their outer flanks scything the grass. They ran as if sewn together. Now they turned in tight formation, doubled back, split, and shot up the rise, breaking the horizon as two vanishers in a rim of sun.
The Shehy range takes its name from the Irish, Cnoic na Seithe, meaning ‘Hills of the Animal Hides’. Perhaps Shehy was in on the feint, accustomed, as Emily Dickinson has it, to ‘Indicating, by no Muscle – / The Experience’ (Bloom on the Mountain). For I was caught in a golden confusion. Startled by their manoeuvre, I recognised them as foxes… no, huge hares?… no, foxes. I had to box my senses and remind myself: long ears, short tails. As they flamed into the sky I realised I had just seen the fabled Golden Hare. If I had been hunter, their noble strategy would have bamboozled me and saved the life of one. As it was, their perfect duet played with my mind.
More extracts here.
More Fieldwork Pieces
Unaccompanied SATB. Written during Storm Darragh
A commission from the Harry Woolhouse Charitable Trust to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Imperial College Sinfonietta. Inspired by one of Europe’s major raised bogs, Carrownagappul, Co. Galway.
For baroque ensemble. Collaborative response to glaciers, commissioned by The Little Baroque Company. In 2016 Bill and the poet Helen Mort climbed in East Greenland.