Time Softly Treads

This setting of the final part of Wordsworth’s An Evening Walk was written between May and August 2008. The poem itself was completed while Wordsworth was still a student at Cambridge and, as with so much of his work, was subject to significant revision later in his life. However, I chose the more atmospheric original version for this piece, although the title Time Softly Treads only ever appears in the revised poem.

The piece begins with the instruments playing in their highest registers, and only gradually do they descend to fill the full available registral space. This strategy is designed to reflect the narrative, in which details are only gradually etched in, and means that for the first part of the setting, following the instrumental introduction, the soprano part forms the bass of the texture. Following the more widely spaced textures of the second half of the work the instruments return to the high registral material with which the piece began.

The choice of Lakeland poetry by Wordsworth presented itself as appropriate for a work dedicated to Sir John Manduell, given his own strong association with the Lake District, although Wordsworth was keen to point out that the poem was inspired by no one particular place. From my own perspective the extract conveys sights and sounds familiar to me from my house in the Peak District, with its views across Toddbrook Reservoir towards Kinder Scout.

Time Softly Treads was commissioned by Ida Carroll Trust and premiered on 20 October 2008 at the Royal Overseas League by soprano Lesley-Jane Rogers with John Turner (recorders), Richard Simpson (oboe), Richard Howarth (violin) and Jonathan Price (cello).  

Philip Grange

From An Evening Walk

But now the clear-bright Moon her zenith gains,
And rimy without speck extend the plains;
The deepest dell the mountain’s breast displays,
Scarce hides a shadow from her searching rays;
From the dark-blue “faint silvery threads” divide
The hills, while gleams below the azure tide;
The scene is waken’d, yet its peace unbroke,
By silver wreaths of quiet charcoal smoke,
That o’er the ruins of the fallen wood,
Steal down the hills, and spread along the flood.

The song of mountain streams unheard by day,
Now hardly heard, beguiles my homeward way.
All air is, as the sleeping water, still,
 Listening the aerial music of the hill,
Broke only by the slow clock tolling deep,
Or shout that wakes the ferryman from sleep,
Soon follow’d by his hollow-parting oar,
And echo’d hoof approaching the far shore;
Sound of clos’d gate, across the water born,
Hurrying the feeding hare thro’ rustling corn;
The tremulous sob of the complaining owl;
And at long intervals the mill-dog’s howl;
The distant forge’s swinging thump profound;
Or yell in the deep wood of the lonely Hound.

William Wordsworth 1787/9