When I started the present work, in 1973, I had no idea that it would grow into a symphony. The Philharmonia Orchestra had commissioned an orchestral work for 1974, and I wrote a moderately long single movement, provisionally called Black Pentecost. This title, taken from the end of a George Mackay Brown poem, concerns the ruined and deserted crofts in the Orkney valley, which had become my home, and I had set it, for soprano and guitar, a short time before in the song-cycle Dark Angels:

The poor and the good fires are all quenched.
Now, cold angel, keep the valley
From the bedlam and cinders of a Black Pentecost.

The symphony eventually grew into the first extended orchestral work where the music was permeated by the presence of the sea and the landscape of this isolated place off the north coast of Scotland. I felt very keenly that this single movement was incomplete, and withdrew it before performance. It was, as it were, budding and putting out shoots, and although I had firmly drawn a final double bar-line, it was reaching out across this, suggesting transformations beyond the confines of a single movement.

Its next step was to become two movements in one, the existing movement compressing to become a short slow movement that changes into a scherzo of a kind, but with the tripartite formal connotations of that name reduced to a 'ghost' in the form's far hinterground. This is now the second movement, a lento that becomes a presto scherzo.

Next, backwards from it, the second movement's first chord sprouted a large new span of music, which eventually became the present separate first movement. The point of connection is still aurally present, in that what is now the last chord of the first movement makes, retrospectively, the first chord of the second.

The ending of the second movement was no conclusion, so a few months later a slow movement proper followed-and finally, the concluding Presto. The scope of the original provisional title had long been outgrown. I had been bolstering my own orchestral composition by analyzing various symphonies and large orchestral works in some detail, and applied in this work certain symphonic solutions and devices into which I believe I gained some kind of insight for the first time-hence I ventured to call the work 'Symphony'. It might be constructive, for the acute listener, if I pointed out these symphonic 'antecedents'.

The transformation from lento to scherzo in the second movement stems from the first movement of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, where a moderato sonata-style movement becomes a scherzo. The cross-phrasing and time-perspective devices in my third movement were developed from the opening of Schumann's Second, and the overall shape and some of the detailing of formal structure in the last movement came, on the surface level, from 'Don' in Pli Selon Pli of Boulez.

The end of the whole work-the stabbing off-beat chords-is an adaptation of Sibelius's solution at the end of his Fifth. These chords, in my work, are a fifth above their harmonically 'logical' position. I did not want the last gesture to sound 'final' in a rhetorical way, giving the impression that I thought I had completely worked through and solved the problems posed by the symphony and could therefore afford to write a (falsely) affirmative conclusion-but, rather, to make audible my impression that the argument was not concluded and that I was aware I had only opened up fields of investigation and not finally harvested all their fruits.

As in my previous works, there is no 'orchestration' as such-the instrumentation functions simply to make the musical argument clear, and one of this size and complexity needs large forces. An unusual feature in the orchestra, however, is the percussion section. It consists of tuned instruments only-the glockenspiel, crotales, marimba and tubular bells, together with celesta, harp and timpani forming a section of the orchestra which carries as much of the thematic and harmonic argument as any other section, and, unusually, has material as musically demanding.

Perhaps it would help to put listeners in a frame of mind sympathetic to at least the intention, if not the result of this work, to know that possibly the creative artists I admire most are two twelfth-century writers, whose language, to my mind, builds the only sound-structures parallel to the statement made by the medieval cathedrals-Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas. To their vision and example I owe a great deal of what might be positive about my efforts towards a musical logic.

The work is dedicated to William Glock, as a mark of friendship and in appreciation of his work for contemporary music during his years as Music Controller at the BBC.

Writer: Peter Maxwell Davies