w17548
| Title | Woods Around Me, The |
| Contributors |
Derek Ball (composer) |
| Composition date | 2007 |
| Duration (mins) | 5 |
| Category | instrumental keyboard solo |
| Instrumentation | Pf |
| Commissioned by | |
| Key signature | |
| First line | |
| First performed | |
| Notes | For Isabelle O'Connell |
| Programme Note | To grow up in the town of Letterkenny (north west Ireland) in the 1950s, even though living in a house in the centre of town, was to be near the countryside. Next door to us, halfway up the Port Road, we had a cinema on one side and a dairy farm on the other. And a short walk down the road, past the station and the sweetie factory, were the woods at Gortlee - Gort Lao, or "Calf Field". Those woods were magical. A visit to them was never a predictable, routine event. There were some familiar landmarks, like the horizontal tree which had blown over at some stage in its growth and continued growing regardless, turning at right angles and starting back up towards a sky glimpsed here and there through the canopy of leaves. But it didn't take long to get out of your depth, uncomfortably outside the familiar territory of little tracks near the unofficial entrance - probably a hole in the fence! And those woods seemed to go on for ever, in no matter what direction we explored them. Recently I revisited the woods, 50 years on. They are still there, but considerably reduced. Now they are small and circumscribed, with new fencing around them. At the back of them, in what used to us to be terra incognita, there is now the urban sprawl of housing estates, with street names which do however evoke the god Sylvanus, whose holy terrors we presumably felt all those years ago. The children living there now - from where will they derive their sense of mystery and wonder? This piece is about childhood memories of Gort Lao and adult reflections on the lost glory of those times. |
This work is associated with the following collection items:
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