Deep in Your Coral Caves

Flute (piccolo), bass clarinet, percussion (marimba, vibraphone,

2 tambourines, crotales & 3 wood blocks)  piano & string trio

5 minutes

Written for and first performed by the  Composer’s Ensemble, conducted

by Chris Austin at the 2000 Hoxton Festival. Recorded on the CD, The Hoxton 13,

by the Composer’s Ensemble conducted by Peter Weigold (NMC D076).

Sound sample performed by The Composers’

Ensemble, directed by Peter Weigold.

Programme note:

Around the headlands near my home in Shetland are caves only accessible by sea. Each contains unique acoustic properties that amplify and transform the cries of seagulls and the wash of waves into reverberating shrieks and dark, muffled growls. When light penetrates the caves, the ebbing and flowing tide creates a magnifying glass of water, constantly changing in density. This mutates creatures and plants into rippling alien forms: gigantic one minute and minute the next, their bright colours reflecting through the water and tinting the liquid red, yellow and green. At the mouths of the caves, swirling, diverging currents rise to the surface to form eddies, which rock the boat, and riding on these streams are shoals of fish, fleeting and then invisible...

Deep In Your Coral Caves is concerned with all these natural phenomena, the title being taken from a verse of Charles E. Oakley’s hymn:

Isles of the Southern seas,

deep in your coral caves

pent be each warring breeze,

lulled be your restless waves: