Joe Stollery

I wrote this piece as part of a workshop day given by the International Percussion Institute on 6-7 August 2019. The title refers to a term given by the local writer Nan Shepherd to describe the natural forces that have shaped upland places like the Cairngorms in her book The Living Mountain.

She also describes these same elementals as shaping the experiences of those who venture into such regions, and this piece for percussion quartet attempts to demonstrate this idea in music. Three performers play constant patterns on several untuned instruments in a variety of different materials to represent the elementals, while the fourth performs a free monologue on marimba to represent an individual travelling through the landscape. Throughout this score, the marimba player is encouraged to distract themselves from their own part by improvising on the other percussionists’ phrases, just like the traveller is affected, psychologically and physically, by natural forces.

‘One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable. There are awakened also in oneself by the contact elementals that are as unpredictable as wind or snow.’

(Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain, p.4)