Arcadia is a work for Violin Soprano Saxophone and Piano inspired by the painting 'Pastoral for E.W.' by John Craxton. As a painter John was sometimes dubbed a 'neo-Romantic' but much preferred the term'Arcadian' - hence the title of the piece. Pastoral for E.W. was painted in 1948 in St John's Wood after one of John's early trips to the island of Crete and is a homage to Peter Watson (co-founder of the magazine 'Horizon' andthe Institute of Contemporary Arts) who was one of John's early mentors.In a letter in 1986 John recounted that: '‘Pastoral for P.W.’: was a celebration of the power of music. My sister (the distinguished oboist JanetCraxton) was learning the oboe on the same floor at the time and the house was full of her scales and exercises coupled with my discovery that goats which seem to be daemonic willful and undisciplined are held in thrall by thesound of a flute - or have I gone a step further and frozen them into my geometry with a paint brush? I suppose the flautist was in origin myself but a very emblematic me!' Ian Collins in his book 'John Craxton' (2011Lund Humphries) says of Pastoral for E.W.: 'A pipe-player and a herd of goats are held in a rugged grid of semi-cubist triangles. While references to Dionysus and Orpheus may be noted it is essentially a fanfare for the ongoinglife light and landscape of Greece'. The music of Arcadia is also Grecian in inspiration. The traditional folk melodies Skaros Epirotikos Vari Pogonisio Ouzak To Tragoudhi Tis Xentias and Pentozalis - Pentozalis arepresent in Arcadia after I researched the type of music that John would have heard in Crete in the late 1940's. In a letter of 3rd May 1984 John said that he was also listening to Stravinsky's Symphony in 3 Movements 'over andover again at the same time when I first started the painting' and aspects of the beginning of the last section of Arcadia (Allegro Moderato) pay homage to the Stravinsky in an attempt to create something of the aural landscape
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Arcadia