When Stuart Thomson and Jo St Leon approached me to write a piece for their duo, I was delighted but also a little nervous because the viola and double bass is a rather unusual combination.  They asked me for a piece that would help increase the repertoire for that combination, and also for something that would be reasonably accessible to audiences.  Meanwhile, my life was very full and busy with two young children, and my 2-year-old daughter was beginning to speak a lot and begin singing nursery rhymes.  It occurred to me that nursery rhymes are so embedded into our verbal language as well as our musical language, that it might be fun to write something inspired by that.  I also wanted to write the viola and double bass parts as an equal partnership, and the melodic nature of the instruments meant that melody and counterpoint would be inherent in the texture.

Rollicking Rhymes is a whimsical and somewhat off-beat take on two well-known nursery rhymes.  The first movement, “Ring-a-roses”, takes snippets of the rhyme tune and blends it with a sailor’s hornpipe which I previously incorporated into a piece that experimented with utilising bagpipe tunes to varying degrees of recognition.  The second movement, “Rockabye”, comes from “Rock-a-bye baby” but here in 5/8 with the familiar tune barely recognisable at all.  As a bit of fun, the third “rhyme” is inspired by the jaunty antics of a rather famous cartoon rabbit, also reminding us of those manic characters who race around in fits and starts before something implausibly crazy happens to them.

Commissioned by Elanée Ensemble, Hobart.

Instrumentation: viola and double bass

Duration: 9 minutes