Killer On The Road

A piece I wrote based on pop chords and structure, my first attempt at anything like this

Piano Pop Song

Out There

In 1956, President Eisenhower signed into law the Federal Highways Act authorising the revolutionary construction of the 42,795 mile National System of Interstate and Defence Highways; the biggest, fastest and most ambitious roads the planet had ever seen. However, soon after the first
roads were completed, Americans began to revolt against their construction. Livelihoods were ruined as roads tore through urban communities ruining previously prosperous neighbourhoods. 

As the freeways spread mechanically across the country, people began to fear the vast anonymity of the roads and who they might encounter there. The murder rate increased dramatically in the decades following the construction of the roads. Public safety notices were issued to motorists: 'Death in Disguise? - Is he a friendly traveller or a vicious murderer?'


The freeway, once hailed as safe and even beautiful, now harboured a deadly new spectre; the 'Killer on the Road'. 

Killer on the Road is a highly programmatic work using literal, descriptive notation. As the piece opens, we hear in the strings the still sound of the great plains laying undisturbed for centuries. The inevitable march of progress and destruction knocks from a distance in the plucked lower strings. The woodwind play a hopeful, pastoral phrase which becomes transposed and distorted to create a feeling of foreboding while the brass fanfares hail the approaching freeways. 

The initial stillness gives way to the sounds of hammering metal and wood in the percussion section as the construction of the roads tears through landscape. Car horns rage in chromatic discords from the brass section and brakes squeal in the upper registers of the strings. The woodwind circle above in noise, smoke and pollution using discordant intervals and irregular rhythms. Chromatic passages ascend from the strings as great rivers of concrete spill over North America carving through the mountains and deserts.

The piece ends with a chorale-like passage in the strings to remember all that has been lost. The woodwind quote from the initial opening material in rising and falling fifths and sevenths followed by a final flurry of smoke and chaos over the mournful strings. The brass give the last fanfare in
resignation to what has been created, dying away leaving only the sound of the juggernauts rumbling away into the distance.

Killer On The Road LIVE 17.03.2024

An orchestral re-imagining of that most popular of Random Hand tracks, Danger Makes Enemies

D Minor Makes Enemies

They All Left The Well

Theme And Block For Two Pianos Score

The Shadow was written as a commission for Northern Ballet Theatre. It is a short ballet based on the tale of The Shadow by Hans Christian Anderson. The Man and his Shadow go travelling together, but the story ends tragically when the Shadow steals his identity leaving the Man to descend into Madness and die.

The Shadow

In 1612, 12 were people accused of the murder of 10 people by witchcraft. They practised incantations and rituals in a tiny beggar’s cottage on the side of Pendle Hill. The key witness in the trial was 9 year-old Jennet Device, the youngest daughter of one of the families accused. Though she knew her whole family could be sentenced to death by hanging, including her own mother, she willingly gave a lengthy and chilling account of what went on in that dark house.

Her family were found guilty and hanged, leaving Jennet alone and an orphan. Years later, ever to be haunted by events of the trial, Jennet herself once again stood in front of a judge accused of witch craft. In the cruellest of irony, it was the evidence of a child that led Jennet to her own gruesome death.

The trial set a terrible precedent, causing an outbreak of mass hysteria surrounding women, the devil and witches! The suspicion and paranoia made its way through England and even to America spawning the famous Salem Witch Trials later in the century.

There was so much musical and programmatic potential in this terrible story. The area surrounding Pendle Hill has such an atmosphere of gloom and foreboding, music seemed to flow naturally from the silence of the hills. As you walk along the dark paths and up into the hills, you can almost hear a witch’s cackle with each step.


P. Ratcliff



The Pendle Witch Child

E R J

Biking

Philippa Jennings is a composer and music tutor based in Silsden, West Yorkshire

Philippa Jennings

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