Ballade No. 5: In days gone by is an exploration of musical story-telling, and, in its use of the generic label ‘Ballade’, aligns itself with a particular tradition of narrativity in instrumental music which arose in the early nineteenth century. The ballade genre has its origins in narrative poetry, and early musical ballades were vocal settings of poetic ballades. Chopin’s four Ballades were the first important instrumental pieces entitled Ballade, and since that time many composers have followed Chopin’s lead in using the title ‘Ballade’ for piano works that evoke an atmosphere of story-telling. Most of these pieces don’t have a story as such, but in their theatrical and heroic qualities are in some sense ‘story-like’.

Ballade No. 5: In days gone by has many characteristics in common with its nineteenth-century models, from its exclusive use of compound metre to the dramatic contrasts of its structure. It is, however, an unusual Ballade insofar as it takes a quintessentially pianistic genre and transfers it to the guitar. In this sense it is also a departure from my previous venture into the genre, the extended piano work Four Ballades (after Chopin). The present piece was conceived as an addition to that set, and I hope to write more Ballades in the future.

While the subtitle, ‘In days gone by’, is a common idiom, it was chosen here as a reference to the opening of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. The phrase seemed evocative of the archaic and almost folk-like mood of the piece. More specifically – and here is perhaps the most direct link to Chopin – I attempted to reproduce a similar narrative framing device at the start of my Ballade, with a stock gesture (a perfect cadence) breaking the silence before the ‘story’ begins.