Programme Notes

This is the first in a long line of art songs I wrote while at Trinity Laban. The comissioner was the tenor Lewis Raines, and he asked for an English song to sit comfortably alongside music by Butterworth and Gurney.

"From Far, from eve and morning", as I see it, is an expression of the persona's desire to aid an ethereal entity which I have interpreted as nature itself. While writing this piece, I thought a lot about what image is conjourned up when "nature" is addressed. The images that surface for me are the rolling hills of the landscape where I grew up; the thickets that linger in the morning; the majestic colours of the sky; the scents as evening transforms the atmosphere all around you. It is these images that made me start the song with a fairly free flowing figure which rises and falls like the breeze. After a fairly sedate introduction of the singer and their part in this landscape, the middle of the song is quite dramatic, which calls for a strong and confident top note from the singer over a fairly hectic piano backdrop. The piece then gently descends back into calmness, and the singer's opening figure appears again in a more spacious form. The opening figure is also quoted near the very end of the song, with "my endless way".