from Hammy Hamilton Compositions
Why people compose tunes is a good point. Often you’d come up with a little hook, and think that it would be great if you could put that into a tune, and that’s very often how they come about. Sometimes what I tend to do is to compose a tune around a technical concept. In this tune the first part is very restricted in terms of the number of notes that it uses, and then it breaks out in the second part. The tune is called the Itchy Cow and it actually relates to a real event. I used to go fishing on Lough Corrib a lot and I was coming down the long road home, fishless, from Galway, through Limerick and to Cork. I was driving through the North of Galway, near Gort, and I looked over in a field and there was a cow standing with his head bowed in front of a goat who was scratching his forehead with his hoof. I thought it was remarkable. In these days if you had a mobile phone you’d take a video of it but I decided to commemorate it with a tune instead.
