New York, NY

Donnacha Dennehy’s Land of Winter at the Irish Arts Center

Alarm Will Sound performs Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy’s newest evening-length work, in which Dennehy explores the interplay of light and time across Ireland’s mercurial seasons of the year. Join us for a special midwinter evening in our beautifully-lit JL Greene Theatre for this magical and immersive orchestral performance.

From the composer:

The Latin name for Ireland was Hibernia which translates as ‘land of winter.’ I suppose the country seemed cold to the Romans. It seems cold to many, especially in July. In a way it is the quality of light that demarcates the seasons, from the shorter days of either grey or piercing light in the winter to the warmer, longer but mercurial light of summer. I like this play between light and time, and it inspires this piece that plays with a connection between time (expanding and contracting temporal processes) and light (harmony, often overtone-hued). Occasionally, the resonance of the term ‘land of winter’—something perennially stuck in its last cycle—engenders a terrifying force in the piece (the linear push towards death, perhaps, or even a kind of climate endgame). Comfort and regeneration are found in the circular recurrences. Structurally, the piece is divided into twelve sections (which I consider as months) connecting to each other continuously. The piece starts in December, and culminates at the end of November, ready to start all over again in winter, as it were. An advent chorale by Bach lurks behind the surface occasionally, influencing the larger harmonic motions, and sometimes working as a generator of upper partials that remain on the musical surface after the chorale itself is erased. In the final movement, November, the chorale itself is gradually revealed in looping windows that create a new, slowly evolving modal harmony out of its re-constituted chronology.