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Variations on a Burns Air – scherzo finale

This variation was written in response to a joint commission project commemorating the 250th anniversary in 2009 of the birth of Robert Burns. Inspired by a stormy crossing from mainland Scotland to the Isle of Arran, the Primrose Piano Quartet chose a Burns air before commissioning one variation each from ten composers, including Sally Beamish, John Casken, Joe Cutler, Stephen Goss, Piers Hellawell and Francis Pott.

The nature of this project was stylistically inclusive and eclectic. Accordingly, no composer was informed as to his or her place in the sequence (running order was determined by the performers only after receiving the music), and none was given any guideline as to tempo, dramatic nature or idiom in his/her contribution.

The approach taken for the submitted variation was to assume that most composers would respond to the elegiac nature of the Jacobite lament enshrined in the Burns text; and, therefore, to aim at the complete opposite. The variation in question was eventually identified as finale to the work as a whole. Initially it invests the entire given theme with an irregular 8/8 meter in which groupings of three quavers straddle barlines and main beats. Emanating from the bass register of the piano, this transfers to the string complement, eventually generating dotted, jig-like patterns against which the piano presents the theme inverted back to its original form, but in an obliquely harmonised guise. Free development creates triple rhythms in both quavers and semiquavers and a sense of events occurring at two simultaneous speeds.

There are moments of fleeting allusion to the early Piano Quartet by Herbert Howells, a work to the repertoire of the Primrose Piano Quartet; also to the Piano Trio on Irish Themes by Frank Martin and to certain harmonic fingerprints of Carl Nielsen, though to no specific work of his.