Wandering on the World

My latest composition, Wandering on the World, is now available on Spotify, Apple Music/iTunes, Amazon, Deezer, etc. Here it is (free) on YouTube:

I chose Wandering on the World as the title because the music circles around the world of musical keys, and does so not in the usual way but in the wrong direction*, as if not quite at home in this world – and because that small word ‘on’ in the title fits this aspect of the music perfectly.

And I chose this title because Wandering on the world, it seems to me, is not at all the same as wandering around the world or in the world: the wanderer on the world seems separate from or above the world rather than a part of it, on the world in the way that an astronaut is said to be on the moon or on another planet. When astronauts return home, we say they are back on earth – but only when they first arrive; soon they are back in this world, back in America or Russia or wherever they came from. That little two-letter word, on, makes the wanderer seem a detached observer, almost like an alien from another planet who has descended onto the earth and is here only as a visitor.

The poem my title comes from, ‘Ash-boughs’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is a work of almost pagan or animistic nature mysticism:

Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,
Is anything a milk to the mind so… as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.
They touch heaven, tabour on it; how their talons sweep
The smouldering enormous winter welkin!
… it is old earth’s groping towards the steep
Heaven whom she childs us by.

This may seem surprising, given that Hopkins was a Catholic priest, but he did not see nature mysticism as incompatible with his religious beliefs (see, e.g., https://mahabahu.com/gerard-manley-hopkins-on-nature-and-god/ for a discussion of this).

Wandering on the World is part of a series of compositions for oboe and strings inspired by and with titles based on Hopkins’ poetry. The others (so far) are The Heart Falls as Light and Immortal Diamond; more are on the way.

Neil Buckland

* “the music circles around the world of musical keys, and does so not in the usual way but in the wrong direction” – technical explanation: the key changes in Wandering on the World move around the circle of fifths, a harmonic or chord progression much used by 18^th century composers such as Bach and Mozart as an expressive device to represent the sublime or heavenly (this is not widely known amongst musicians and music historians, but I’m aiming soon to publish online my musicology thesis which provides extensive evidence for this). The circle of fifths is usually traversed by descending 5ths (starting, for example, in C then moving to F then Bb, Eb etc.) but in Wandering on the World the modulations (key changes) move upwards around the circle: C to G to D to A to e minor, b minor… except in the middle of the b minor section where there is a sudden slide to Bb major which then leads upwards by 5ths again to F and back to the home key of C.