On a Summer Night is a setting of a poem by a girl called Sophie Large, who tragically died in a car accident at the age of 19. This is one of the last poems she wrote and it has some wonderful imagery, which I have attempted to compliment musically. I decided to set it as a two part, unaccompanied song, using a simple melody that gradually diverges and introduces simple harmony. It is rhythmically and structurally quite unusual, using the mixolydian mode as its basis (instead of a major or minor scale), intended to reflect and highlight the atmospheric text. It finishes equivocally, ending with the line ‘Not yet, I say, don’t mourn me yet!’, leaving the listener to decide whether it is indeed complete.

from notes by Oliver Iredale Searle © 2010