Instrumentation: 2222 - 4000 - timp - harp - strings

In addition to his large-scale orchestral and choral work Standing Stone, Paul McCartney wrote three shorter orchestral pieces during the 1990’s for his album Working Classical: A Leaf, Spiral and Tuesday. All three are gentle (for the most part), impressionistic mood-pictures: they belong to an English pastoral tradition that includes Delius’ Summer Night on the River and Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad. It is no coincidence that McCartney is also a painter, and that he has lived for many years in the country: the city ethos of his upbringing, which informed most of his songs for the Beatles, has largely been superseded by a strong feeling for rural landscape, and its evocation in music. The opening theme of Tuesday was written for an animated film based on an American children’s book of the same name. In 1999, McCartney extended it by adding several sections in varying moods and speeds, rather as he had done in A Leaf. These include a sudden stern, bell-like episode with prominent horns, and, following this, a beautiful melody in A flat, begun by the horns and continued by the strings. The final section is an exact repeat of the first, but with a different ending, which fades into silence.