PROGRAMME NOTES

Cellars Clough Duo

Two guitars (1988)

Cellars Clough Duo was commissioned by Fisher, Firth & Co. Ltd for Richard Hand and Tom Dupré, who gave the first performance at the Wigmore Hall on 1 May 1988.

On receiving the commission, Peter Dickinson borrowed a guitar and worked out his Five Explorations for solo guitar and then drew on these textures for the Cellars Clough Duo. Since the commission was intended to mark the centenary of Fisher Firth & Co. Ltd., the woollen yarn spinners at Cellars Clough, Marsden, near Huddersfield, the composer incorporated one of the versions of the Yorkshire folk-tune Scarborough Fair. There are five sections:

1. A landscape in which Scarborough Fair is in the background with bells and other sounds superimposed.
2. A kind of interrupted samba emerging from silences with a rock version of Scarborough Fair in the middle.
3. An elegy with a long tune: miniature cadenzas lead to Scarborough Fair as a march receding into the distance.
4. A kind of funeral march, with more bells and Scarborough Fair above.
5. A toccata with glimpses of Scarborough Fair as a waltz and a rag.

[see also Suffolk Variations in Guitar Styles: Classical, edited by Michael Stimpson, Oxford University Press 1994]