FAREWELL TO STROMNESS (P.M. DAVIES)


About

This piece was composed in 1980 by Peter Maxwell Davies. The story behind the tune is that near the town of Stromness, on the Orkney Islands, uranium had been discovered. The Secretary of State for Scotland planned to exploit this radioactive material, which would have led to pollution and displacement of the local residents, hence „Farewell to Stromness“. Luckily, the project was cancelled, but with politicians, you never know.  

I did not know anything about this before Mark from Scotland requested the tab some weeks ago. It’s a wonderful warm-hearted piece of music. I loved it from the start.

 

Original Key

D

 

Tuning 

Low G

 

Tab Notes

It has two parts:

[ A ]  Sweet melody, make sure to continue the bass figure during the main theme.

[ B ]  Here comes trouble. Time change to 2/4 and the key changes twice in this section. A four bar bridge leads over to Part [ A] again. 

Ok, this tune is not really tailor-made for the ukulele. The original piano piece is strongly based on the continuing bass figure. But it has something irresistible, it had to be uked. As you might have guessed, I did some simplification here and there. Still it contains some tricky fragments. The chord names are greyed out, they are just for orientation.


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Farewell to Stromness.pdf
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