Chorale for string quartet

Chorale for string quartet [2023] WORLD PREMIERE

Commissioned by the West Cork Chamber Music Festival for the Pacifica Quartet

I’ve recently taken up swimming quite earnestly, and so I’ve become fixated on the mechanisms of breathing. Chorale unfolds like breaths, each moving from a position of heightened tension (in the upper chest as it were) to a kind of deeply relaxed oscillation in the diaphragm.  A slowly evolving chorale (often presented in expanding, varying frames) underpins these ever-lengthening breaths.  Some of these harmonies are taken from a Bach chorale with the text “your word was for a long time obscured”.

Donnacha Dennehy