What is it?

Ebb Tide is a setting for voice (ideally a tenor-biased baritone), two flutes, oboe and strings of a poem by my cousin Julia Allard, who died on December 4th, 2023. It's a beautifully visual piece of music, which probably captures better than any of my other compositions the sense of the sea, seabirds, fishing boats and a small coastal fishing community. It's quite easy to sing and the orchestral parts are suitable for an advanced high school orchestra.

Following Julia's death, I learned that this piece had meant a lot to her and that she was proud of her part in it. Ebb Tide would not have existed without her.

There's nothing much I could say about this beyond a comment made by Shaun Curnow, a friend of Julia's: "Beautiful and very touching".

I am Cornish and proud of it. I grew up with the sea nine miles to the northwest and seven miles to the southeast. Though born in Camborne my mother spent her childhood in St Ives. My father was from Penzance, with relatives in Newlyn and Marazion. So I know the sea. I know its rhythms and its moods. I know the sound of a sloop moored against a jetty, a foghorn in the distance or the cries of kittiwakes as they glide over sea cliffs.

The music of Ebb Tide is profoundly influenced by the rhythms of the sea itself, by the lurching sensation of being on board a boat with a hull length of around twenty feet on a relatively calm sea with a slight chop and by the characteristic calls of seagulls. I know well the stretch of coastline described in the poem, the sight of crab pots stacked by an old fisherman’s shack at Cape Cornwall and the sea to the west of Land’s End. So it required very little effort on my part to translate these impressions into a world of music.

I met Julia Allard for the first time early in 2014, having been told by my birth mother (I was adopted) that she was one of my first cousins. She and I soon discovered that we had a great deal in common, not the least of which was a peculiarly Cornish sense of humour.

Julia sent to me a couple of her poems, probably with no particular expectation as to what I would do with it. I looked at the first of them, Ebb Tide. It seemed in a way symbolic of a successful family reunion that my music and Julia's poetry should somehow come together. So I composed the setting as you now hear it. Julia told me that it is very much an expression of my Celtic nature.

The dedication in the score of Ebb Tide reads “In memory of my Uncle Roy, whom I never knew”. Roy was Julia’s father and a brother of my birth mother. He died in an industral accident in the 1950s.