Edward McGuire: Botanic Gardens [download]

This music is inspired by Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, anticipating their 200th anniversary in 2017. I take a stroll there whenever possible.

This continuous sequence uses a variety of musical intervals to achieve its spectrum of colours. Fifths, fourths, then thirds, whole tones and semitones mark its 6 sections: Metasequoia, Arid Zone, Humid Tropics, Spicy & Economic, Meeting Old Friends, Kibble Palace Sunset.

The Metasequoia tree has a distinctive wide base that rises to a fine point (the whole keyboard is used to suggest this); it was thought to. be just a fossil (discovered in Japan) until a living specimen was found in China in 1941. The Arid Zone introduces a dry staccato - and remembers James Iliff, my composition teacher, who was an expect on cacti. The interval of a third is used with a repeating pulse of seven beats. Humid Tropics is suitably lush while the semitone activity of Spicy & Economic reminds us of the regions exploited for their labour and productivity. The pleasant surprise of crossing paths with familiar faces in the gardens is represented in Meeting Old Friends; Jimmy Cloughey and his fellow Upper Clydeside Shipbuilders work-in veterans are represented here in the four overlapping voices of a short fugal section. The previously widely separated intervals of the opening theme are then brought close together in a melodic line. The vision of the newly-restored glasshouse, the Kibble Palace, fades away on the final chords.