In 1975 the Afrikaner poet and painter Breyten Breytenbach (1939-2024) was arrested by the apartheid South African régime for "terrorist activities". He spent the next seven years in a prison cell - first in Pretoria Central Prison, and later in Pollsmoor near Capetown. Most of this time was spent in solitary confinement. After his release in 1982 he wrote The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist - a haunting account of his years in prison which was published in 1984, and is a profound, unsentimental analysis of the effects of cruelty and deprivation.

At the end of 1988 I contacted Breytenbach, who lived in Paris, and asked his permission to use short excerpts from True Confessions for a choral piece. We had many ideas and interests in common, and soon became friends. Meanwhile the form and spirit of the piece for brass quintet which I was then planning became imbued with ideas from True Confessions. Much of Breytenbach's book is concerned with the passing of time; and I was struck by the idea of a person in solitary confinement trying to make sense out of senseless isolation, trying to make time pass more quickly; and I tried to imagine how I myself, thrust into such a situation, might cope with it. Breytenbach writes about "staring at the wall, living with an ear at the door and yet cringing at the slightest noise, talking to the ants, starting to have hallucinations . . .  You are buried to what you know as normal life outside: the rhythms of day and night, of the seasons of the year, the rhythms of intercourse and communication between people with hands, between butterflies and croissants and dolphins, the million little things which weave the cloth your life consists of."

I started from three simple ideas: a fluttering sound, a pulse, and silence. Pulse, after all, is the passing of time. There are five different pulses in A memory of sky, ranging from slow to fast; the music flits from one to another. The fluttering is created by irregular patterns of rapidly repeated notes, and is then combined with pulses. The result is a static but unpredictable sound-texture which I thought of as a form of audible silence. In this way, I composed ten "silences" - two at each pulse-rate (one loud and active, the other quiet and passive). They are not literally silent, of course; but they make no attempt to do anything or move in any direction. They simply exist, empty and unchanging, but mysteriously unpredictable. I spaced them across the course of the piece, much as bars are spaced on the window of a prison-cell. Memories of sky appear between these silences, like the sky itself between the bars. Breytenbach again: "On summer days when you were cleaning the corridor, you could see through the grill clouds passing along the blue highway above the yard wall facing you: boats on their way to a dream . . ."

A memory of sky was commissioned by Fine Arts Brass ensemble, and first performed by them at St. Lawrence's Church in Hungerford on May 16th 1989