The weather of it

Every writer I know
seems to aspire to the wordlessness of music. My friend and
collaborator, the wonderful writer Enda Walsh, talks jealously of
music all the time. Admiringly, he quotes Sarah Kane who when once
asked about a new play said that she had not written a word of it but
could hum it. Tiring of questions about narrative meaning, when we
were rehearsing an opera for which he wrote the libretto, Enda asked
instead that people concentrate on the
weather of it.

Funnily enough, ideas of weather do often concretely
influence the way I juxtapose and shift material. Maybe it’s got to
do with originally coming from Ireland where the weather can shift
from heavy to light in an instant. I often think of material
condensing and evaporating. Technically too the music shifts between
equal temperament and material based on the overtone series.
Pulsating glissandos accomplish this in a gradual way; in other
places it happens abruptly, like a jump cut in cinema. 

Gradually
the separate strands in this piece combine and start to condense into
a very dense driven section before they fracture and gently evaporate
— this idea of evaporation is what drove me in my approach to this
piece. 

Co-commissioned
by The Radcliffe Trust, NMC Recordings, Carnegie Hall, and by Wigmore
Hall, with the support of André Hoffmann, president of the Fondation
Hoffmann, a Swiss grant-making foundation, The
weather of it is
dedicated to Enda Walsh. 
Donnacha
Dennehy, June 2016