Among the major musical fruits of Chisholm's wartime experiences are the two works which give this Centre-piece its title.

The orchestral work, Pictures from Dante, was substantially based upon a ballet he wrote during the war and, since it moves from Inferno to Paradiso, can be said to extricate itself from the horrors of human depravity which war entails. Night Song of the Bards also progresses from darkness to light, its ending anticipating the inevitability of dawn. It draws on Chisholm's experiences of Hindustani music during his brief stay in northern India towards the end of the Second World War, but is equally rooted in Celtic tradition.

Pictures from Dante is in two movements and was completed in South Africa in 1948 and dedicated to Sorabji (See Interlude: The Love of Sorabji). It received its first performance in 1952 from the Vienna Radio Orchestra under Kurt Woess. The original full score and parts are in Cape Town. The first South African performance was on 30 August 1960, as part of the final concert for the South African College of Music jubilee celebrations (see Chapter 9).

The inclusion of Pictures from Dante among the Scottish works requires explanation. Was Chisholm aware that Dante's Inferno and Paradiso had their origins in part in Celtic Christian visionary poetry? C. S. Boswell's Irish Precursors of Dante had been published in London in 1908 along with a translation of the tenth/eleventh-century Fis Adamnain with which the work of Dante has several significant parallels, although these were probably transmitted indirectly. Whatever the case, Chisholm had a more obvious reason for describing the work as ‘Scottish’, and that is that the first movement is derived directly from Scene III of his ballet Piobaireachd and the first part of the second movement from Scene II. According to what he wrote on the score, the ballet was composed in 1940–1. I know of no performance of the ballet, and am also unaware of anyone else's involvement in its conception or possible execution. Perhaps its length was daunting, and since Chisholm intended that it should be based in part on scenes from Dante's Inferno as illustrated by Gustave Doré, it may be that Morris and others felt that this was depriving them of a Celtic design input.

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