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My second string quartet is a portrait of the natural water systems that bring clean water from the great mountain that shadows Hobart, through various rivulets back to the river, where it can be purified by evaporation and return to the top of the mountain to begin the cycle again.

The name is a double-entendre – the mountain-fed rivulets gave life to settlements at its base (as with much fauna along their courses) but also it refers to my notion that natural water systems are somewhat like a giant solar-powered distillery, purifying the water as it collects various impurities and objects as gravity pulls it towards the rivers and seas.

The opening section uses a blend of folk and old liturgical styles to suggest the purity of the source of the rivulet at the top of the mountain. This then gives way to a section illustrating the growing streams as a magnet for local life – using fragments of bird calls and pizzicato water “plops”, and incorporating a canon of a falling figure alternating and superimposing triplet and semiquaver rhythms representing the turbulence of waterfalls.

A sharp turn into the controlled water flow through the city finds urban noises (again using the grace note “flicks” from the birds earlier but in more man-made context) and the eerie sounds of the underground pipes that divert the flow, before the water tumbles into the river and is once again drawn into the sky to be spirited away to the top of the mountain.