Britta Byström

Picnic At Hanging Rock

Picnic At Hanging Rock (Utflykt til det okända) for Orchestra by Britta Byström (2010).

Programme Note

'What we see and what we seem are but adream, a dream within a dream' - These words opens Peter Wier's film on Joan Lindsay's novel Picnic at Hanging Rock from 1967. The story takes place on Valentines Day 1900. A groupof school girls go on a picnic at Hanging Rock in Australia and get caught up in a volcanic eruption. Three of the girls disappear without a trace - as if they where swallowed up by the mountain.

Inspiredby Peter Weir's poetic and many layered film I have composed a tone poem - with the emphasis on poem - or poetry - as opposed to programme music. Disappearance is an important motif. The piece is aseries of disappearances and transformations - one after another. At the end you can hear how the sound of the orchestra disappears in a swarm of clanging triangles - a way of picturing the girls disappearing into themountain.

I have tried to catch several other of the characteristics of the film: The school girls in their white dresses, the dangerous yet alluring mountain where the watches mysteriously stop at 12, the spellthat makes the girls climb higher and higher, and - at the end - the unanswered hesitant question: what really did happen?

Britta Byström