 Described as a funeral march by William Mann in a review of an early recording in 1975 and by the composer himself as "a huge Adagio of Mahlerian proportions", it is quite possibly one of the finest examples of the style Birtwistle developed in the 70s, which he entitled "processional music".Birtwistle himself described the piece as being "a processional in which nothing changes – the slow passing of time is the controlling factor, like in the Bruegel woodcut in which the elephant’s pace determines things"., though he has also stated that "we could say that all music is a processional", insofar as all music is continuously unfolding.The piece is marked ♩ = ca.