Originally written for guitar and harp, this arrangement of Frozen Landscapes was arranged for harp ensemble by Helen Webby in collaboration with the composer.
Frozen Landscapes was written especially for Helen Webby and Davy Stuart in 2006. I initially intended it to be a piece that would fit nicely within the rest of Helen and Davy's repertoire, of which a substantial part is Gaelic music. It was Davy in fact who came up with the idea of the icy theme to the piece – I wrote the last movement first, and when he started working on it, his wife said it sounded like icicles, and wondered whether it was inspired by my trip to Antarctica in 2005. I listened to it again, and totally agreed – somehow, I'd subconsciously written an Antarctic piece without realising!
The first two movements weren't finished at that point, and so inevitably the piece became more deliberately icy from that point on, with images coming to my mind of the snow-capped peaks, the huge crevasses, and the more delicate little patterns that appear in the ice formations.
The piece exploits the modal nature of the folk harp (you can set the strings to any scale you want), and I've created an unusual mode based on D with a key signature of F-sharp and G-sharp.
