PROGRAMME NOTES

Late Afternoon In November

Sixteen solo voices or multiples of that number (1975)

Text: Peter Dickinson

Late Afternoon in November was commissioned by the BBC for Stephen Wilkinson and the BBC Northern Singers, who gave an outstanding first performance of this demanding piece at Keele University on 14 November 1975. The first BBC Radio 3 broadcast was from that concert on 30 December 1976.

The work creates a close correspondence between words and music, even to the extent of using letters of the alphabet in the text to provide pitches. Dickinson took a simple landscape poem he wrote when he was at Cambridge and matched its bleak wintry atmosphere with deliberately static music.