Remember, remember - Thursday 5th November

On Thursday 5th November 2026 (8pm) at St Peter's Anglican Church in Canterbury - at a Free Range event called 'Remember, remember' - we revisit an old work of mine.

Bucolia (2004) was originally written for Owen Hewson (clarinet), Lorna Braddy and myself (violins), Tom Spencer (cello) and Aidan Shepherd (piano) as an A-level assignment.

Bucolia is corruption of bucolic and 'folia' from the well-known Portuguese Folia theme from the 15th Century - a theme that has often inspired works that I have written both before and since.

My personal perception of the countryside at a particular point in time lead to the bucolic aspect. However, in Bucolia, the underlying ground bass that binds my variations together is formed from a heavily deconstructed version of Corelli's violin sonata - La Folia (1700) - using a simplified snapshot of the melody in the first three bars (D - C# - D), a retrograde of the bass line during the mid-way phrygian cadence (D - Bb - A) and the chromatic rising bass line taken near the end of the theme (C - C# - D) all of which are transposed, usually to aid the journey away from and the return to E minor.

The opening theme is formed from a transposition of the simplified first three bars (E - D# - E), the transposed retrograde (G - Ab - C) and the chromatic rising figure (F# - G - Ab) each derived from Corelli's opening theme respectively.

My most significant inspiration for the subsequent handling of the ground bass was from the 2nd movement of Michael Tippett's Symphony No. 1 (1945), which incidentally begins with B - A#- B. Similarly to Tippett's treatment of the ground bass, it continues throughout in varying registers and transpositions.

First Public Performance

12th May 2004

Canterbury Catheral commemoration service