When I mentioned to Simon Lenton of the Fine Arts Brass Quintet that I would like to write another piece for them (my previous brass quintet, “Giochi di Sospiri”, was commissioned in 1992), he suggested that the first performance might take place in Linlithgow, a historic town in central Scotland which has a magnificent, ruined palace where Mary Queen of Scots was born. As a starting point therefore, I had a look at a website on the town and discovered that its crest was a dog running in front of a tree. This dog was evidently called “The Black Bitch” and subsequent investigations lead me to the following legend.
A man was convicted of theft and was sentenced to die by
being chained to a tree on one of the islands in Linlithgow
loch and left to starve. No-one could understand why he
remained alive until it was realised that his dog – a black
bitch – was swimming to the island each night with food.
So they chained the dog to a neighbouring tree and left
both of them to starve to death.
This short Elegy, whilst it is in no conscious way a programmatic description of the harrowing events of the story, does attempt to offer a simple tribute to a creature which clearly befits the epitaph of “man’s best friend”.
Elegy For The Black Bitch was nominated in the 2005 British Composer Awards.