University of York Music Press

The piece was inspired by Hanns Eisler's chamber music for the same film (Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain, 1941) but offers a very different reading and approach to Eisler's. Hughes says about his work with silent film: 'By obsessively studying the work of an artist working in another time-based medium, I have learnt things which I can apply to my own work as a composer. For example, the constant sense of time passing as the film clatters through the projector makes this structural level explicit. And a film's visual style encourages you to reappraise your own assumptions about musical surface and gesture.'

The New Music Players will be touring Light Cuts Through Dark Skies again this autumn in three concerts (23/10/04, 4/11/04 and 8/12/04) which feature screenings of Iven's Rain, two of which also include Eisler's work. Hughes' work was originally commissioned by the Bath International Music Festival in 2001.