The work was first performed by Nicholas Daniel (oboe) and Julius Drake (piano) in St Magnus Cathedral, Orkney, as part of the 1995 St Magnus festival. The title is a quotation from the penultimate paragraph of The Waves (1931): ‘Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again’. Knotts notes that it ‘was one of my first professional commissions: I was very interested at the time in the idea of the organic as a governing principle in creative work and I wrote a number of pieces which took Woolf as formal models. I was very interested in the way that her prose grows seamlessly - organically – and it was something I was keen to reflect’. [Programme note by Emma Sutton]