I first came across “Elsewhen” by Lillie Harris when she wrote it for the St. Magnus Composers’ course in 2017 and I knew straight away that I wanted to programme it with Nordic Viola. It is so evocative of the ancient monuments, and in particular of the Stones of Stenness, with its sense of mystery and eeriness. There’s something quite unsettling about the music or, as Orkney Arts Society put it, “There is edge here – edges, edginess, margins and menace under the surface.”
I’ll leave you with Lillie now to explain a little bit more about the piece, working alongside Orla Stevens on the art and, in general, about her collaboration with Nordic Viola.
Ancient sites are intriguing: they offer us amazement at the sheer age of artefacts, many mysteries of why things were that way, and the sense of a delicate thread connecting us now, to those people then. Our interactions with these relics helps us build an image of our past, but there is only so much we can learn from what remains – the rest is lost to time.
In ‘Elsewhen’ I have sought to capture the strangeness, wonder, and melancholy of objects and sites that exist out of time: they retain traces and memories of the past, but have outlived those for whom they were built, and have been left behind.
Written for the St Magnus Composers Course 2017
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