Score available at: www.universale...
Bòcain was written for the violinist Rock Lee in the early part of 2019, ahead of its premiere performance later that year in Glasgow, Scotland. The piece was commissioned in order to showcase as many of the violin's technical abilities as possible, with the composer wishing to demonstrate these whilst also allowing for his own musical expression to 'shine through'. The piece's title, Bòcain, can be translated to English as Apparitions. Deliberately vague, the piece is supposed to express the sense of unease and other-worldliness that one experiences amongst the mountains of Scotland in a thick fog. The 'apparitions' of the title being the imagery the brain creates in order to fill the blank space created by conditions it cannot fully comprehend, and amongst landscapes familiar in theory, but unfamiliar in practice.
The piece is in five broad sections. These can broadly be identified by the related, changing tempi during the piece. After the opening, the second section begins at bar 36, after a metric modulation transition from bars 32-35. The third section is in the same tempo as the second, but with greater momentum from the quintuplet figure. It begins in bar 66. The fourth section continues to build energy, arriving via another metric modulation with very little preparation in bar 83. The final, more reflective section features heavily two-voiced tremolando, and begins in bar 94 after the piece's climax.