The musical career of Peter Knight continues with this CD to develop in surprising new directions. But it’s the nature of music itself that it should continually take off in directions which weren’t expected. Although it runs on staves, it loves to loop the loop. Like recreational walking, it aspires – and can afford – to be excursionary. It conducts you to a destination that you might not foresee; and it leads you back again, to the point from which you started, with an enhanced sense of your whereabouts in the world.

The uniqueness of this commission is that it finds two ways of creating those extraordinary effects. First, it is Music While You Walk composed and performed by Peter Knight. And Peter’s writing and playing have always lent themselves to glorious circuitous journeys. A piece like “Eb English,” from An Ancient Cause (1991), passes through the most evocative of places, reaches them by the most exhilarating of routes, and at the end of all its exploring manages a breathtaking reinstatement of the theme on whose trail it set out. The present piece matches its own qualities of beauty and roundedness to those of the woodland walk which it was written to accompany. This is programme music (music whose very processes reflect what it represents, and whose inner dynamics reveal its subject) for an enchanted sylvan space.
Second, the commission was carried out for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. In its sampling of the sonnets and the festive comedies, which form the perfect ground for the “sweet division” that the soaring music makes, Peter Knight’s new piece contains fitting recognition of that fact. Beginning with A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, it weaves in whispers from the green world which Shakespeare so intensely imagined, and in twenty minutes has put Puck’s girdle round about that world.