Scottish Music Centre - Catalogue

Programme Note

Praise of Ben Dorain has been ‘work in progress’ for many years and its completion and first performance form the climax of Stevenson’s compositional career. Stevenson himself offers the following information about the work’s genesis, structure and sources: ‘Hugh MacDiarmid suggested that I compose music to Duncan Ban MacIntyre’s poem Ben Dorain. I have used the original Gaelic for the full choir, and MacDiarmid’s English for the chamber choir. There are two orchestras: symphony orchestra and chamber. Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724-1812) subtitles the form of his poem to the variations of pibroch. The ‘siubhal’ or ‘doubling’ of the pibroch-poem relates to the art and form of a fugue. As additional source material I have used a Ben Dorain song from South Uist, collected by Margaret Fay Shaw: ‘There’s aye wailing on Ben Dorain.’ A Nova Scotian Air collected by Arthur Geddes is also used with a direct reference to Duncan Ban MacIntyre. Anne Lorne Gillies’s edition of Duncan Ban’s ‘Last Farewell To The Bens’ is also invoked along with Arthur Geddes’s English translation of the latter song. To the music of the epilogue I have set David Betteridge’s valedictory verse:

And when our vision-hungry souls are filled
through the pibroch of your words’ unwinding,
Surely, safely homeward bring us back
To where this journey had its start….

So folk-song collecting has been updated here to 21st century sources.’

Ronald Stevenson is 80 this year. As James MacMillan has written: ‘Scotland should celebrate this in a big way.’ There can be no better way of doing so than with the world premiere of Praise of Ben Dorain.

Alastair Chisholm [January, 2008]