Enter The Day for Wind Quintet by Ian B Wilson
Instrumentation: flute (doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling English horn), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), horn, bassoon
Score and parts
British composer Ian Wilson is a music graduate of Durham University, where he received composition lessons from John Casken, and is currently a secondary head teacher. He is a prizewinning composer, having won the Commonwealth Music Competition in 2019 for his piece, ‘A Commonwealth Childhood’, which was performed in the 2020 Commonwealth celebrations and is being published by Kingfisher Music and given a commercial recording. He is a member of the Colchester New Music Group and has had regular performances of his works across the Eastern region. The ensembles for which he has written include the British Clarinet Ensemble, the National Flute Choir and the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra, who performed his ‘Three Songs from A Shropshire Lad’ in May 2012 with tenor Gordon Wilson. A song for communion is published on the CCLI website. He has conducted the Huntingdonshire Philharmonic Society and the St Cecilia Choir in Chelmsford. At St Bonaventure’s School he ran a boys’ choir which won the BBC Choir of the Year regional round in Cambridge, sang at the National Festival of Youth Music regularly, appeared several times on television and won the Jack Petchey Gold Award.
About Enter The Day: Every day I am woken by an alarm that plays William Boyce’s lovely pointed psalm setting of Psalm 63. It gradually filters into my consciousness, infusing my dreams with phrases and harmonies. ‘Enter the Day’ starts with the strangeness and discord of sleep and gradually transforms into the concord and serenity of the Boyce setting, ‘O God, Thou Art My God’. The path from sleep to waking is not smooth, so the winds tangle and coalesce as the psalm theme gradually emerges. The piece was written for “Westerly Winds”, a quintet built around players from the Glasgow Orchestral Society. — Ian Wilson
