Description

banks and braes…

for Solo Piano
Duration: ca. 3′

by Edward Caine

This is a short piece exploring the Scottish Poet Robert Burns’s song “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon”, a song I often think of wistfully when thinking back to my own childhood in Scotland. In writing it, I’m attempting to paint what I imagine to be a fairly gothic and thorny picture of the scene of the the jilted Margaret Kennedy on the banks of the Doon, with bristling briers around her and a bird tweeting in the trees and mocking her. The language of the piece is in some ways informed by the music of Michael Finnissy, with whom I had recently spent some time.