Stately Horn

“Stately Horn” is a piece of classical music written by Paul McCartney. In early 1995, while working on what would become “Standing Stone“, he discovered how he could use the music software Cubase to compose classical music. McCartney has never known how to write music using classical notation, and therefore Cubase was the perfect tool for him to write classical pieces without some external help.

I had been hanging out with Allen Ginsberg, backing him on guitar for a [1996] recording and an Albert Hall concert he did of a poem called ‘The Ballad Of The Skeletons.’ So I thought it’d be a nice thing for me to condense the images for the symphony into a poem. And it felt kinda handy in such a big piece, because if I was wondering where I was going in the music, I’d just refer to the poem and say, ‘Right, that next bit is this bit.’ And as a practice for working in this new world, I started to compose smaller pieces.

Paul McCartney, from Billboard interview, 1997

“Stately Horn” is one of those smaller pieces written in anticipation of working on “Standing Stone“. Lasting 9 minutes, the piece is composed of three segments, named:

I. Eroico
II. Contemplativo
III. Medievale

It was performed by the Michael Thompson Horn Quartet, during the World Premiere and US Premiere of “Standing Stone” in 1997, but was never released on disc.

Bootlegs

Live performances

“Stately Horn” has been played in 2 concerts.

Latest concerts where “Stately Horn” has been played