Matthew Whittall

Songs of Travel

Matthew Whittall's large-scale choral song cycle Songs of Travel (2020-2021) is set to poems by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), compiled and adapted by the composer. The opening song, Home no more home, presents a simple, ambiguously modal tune at the outset, before sending out tendrils in searching, halting rhythms, a slow, reluctant tread off into the hills, clouded by memory. The middle three songs are brighter in tone, attempting to find solace in a variety of places - in the land, in the firma-ment, on the sea - but all ultimately turn reflectively inward. In the highlands touches on a number of folk traditions, including bagpipe-like strains and a Swedish herding call known as kulning. The infinite shining heavens is a rapt, glowing meditation on the night sky. Give me the sun is an original setting of Stevenson's lyrics for the popular Skye Boat Song, with fragments of the original tune ghosted here and there throughout the texture. The final movement, Evensong, combines three poems on the theme of leave-taking. Here the tone of melancholy becomes one of gentle resignation, not to an ending, but an acceptance of suffering, and of transience. Duration: 30' 1. Home no more home (7') 2. In the highlands (4'30'') 3. The infinite shining heavens (5') 4. Give me the sun (5'30'') 5. Evensong (8')