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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
In this article the Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy reflects upon the research and composition process of his 2006–07 composition Grá agus Bás, written for the Irish sean nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird. The piece is the first to bring together this traditional Irish singing style (literally, ‘old tradition’) with techniques derived from spectral music. In the second part of the article Dennehy reflects on his own relationship with spectralism, his points of inspiration and points of departure from what have come to seem spectral orthodoxies.
1 This article is derived from material from my DMA thesis, ‘Owning Overtones: The Impact Of Spectral Approaches On My Music’ (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2014). The score of Grá agus Bás is distributed by Ergodos and available from [email protected]. The piece is recorded on Nonesuch Records.
2 I had written folk-inspired pieces as young child. The only other time I consciously made use of such material was in a deliberately cheeky way when I quoted a dance played by the Chieftains in an early tape piece, GUBU (1995). (GUBU is an acronym coined for a political scandal in Ireland in the 1980s. It stands for ‘grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre and unbelievable’.)
3 Another taboo existed in relation to composers or others making use of folk music, and that was that one might corrupt the purity of the tradition. Indeed when Grá agus Bás first toured Ireland in the autumn of 2007, some commentators said as much on an arts program on TG4 (the Irish language television station).
4 Iarla Ó Lionáird, Seven Steps to Mercy, Real World Records, 7243 8 44647 2 1, 1997.
5 Although the first meeting took place in December 2004, the meetings only really became regular in 2006, as I became clearer about what I needed in order to write the piece.
6 There was also a movement among some classical composers in Ireland (since it achieved its independence from Britain in 1922) to establish a kind of nationalist style for a while. A number made use of sean nós material in their compositions, but this use was largely based on conservative, tidied-up transcriptions made by Anglo-Irish collectors. Invariably any microtonal element was removed and these were treated as equal-tempered tunes, thus robbing them of much that made them beguiling and sonically interesting.
7 Dennehy, Grá agus Bás, preface.
8 Another thing that had a very strong bearing upon my choice of ‘samples’ from the original song was their meaning. Already I was constructing a kind of rewriting of the story of Aisling Gheal, making it into a story of forsaken love in which everything emanated from the couple's act of making love, and the man's attempt to deny the consequences of that, including parentage of any child that resulted. I also added a kind of obsessive edge by taking a few lines from Táim sínte ar do thuama which translates as ‘There is a nail on my heart; I am filled with love for you’. I was very interested in making it personal, and not an allegory for the state of Ireland, which was often the de facto interpretation of many of these songs.
9 The instrumental sustains were mocked up initially using standard sampler instruments. Later I incorporated real recordings of instrumentalists playing either sustained harmonics or pulsing patterns of harmonics.
10 Dennehy, Grá agus Bás, preface.
11 Harvey, Jonathan, ‘Spectralism’, Contemporary Music Review, 19/3 (2001), pp. 11–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Harvey, ‘Spectralism’.
13 Harvey, ‘Spectralism’.
14 Murail, Tristan, ‘Target Practice’, Contemporary Music Review, 24/2–3 (2005), pp. 149–171CrossRefGoogle Scholar; here p. 152.
15 Murail, ‘Target Practice’, p. 153.
16 Murail, ‘Target Practice’, p. 152.
17 Anderson, Julian, ‘A Provisional History of Spectral Music’, Contemporary Music Review, 19/2 (2000), pp. 7–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Harvey for one considers Wagner a proto-spectral composer: ‘Wagner the master of harmony himself developed into a proto-spectralist; for instance in Parsifal, where the real vision, it always seems to me, is one of timbre: the transcendence offered by the Holy Grail is not couched in terms of developed harmony (that is reserved for suffering, by and large) but of timbre, of orchestration based on chords magically transmuted to harmonic series, to spectra’. Harvey, ‘Spectralism’, p. 12.
19 Brün, Herbert, My Words and Where I Want Them (London: Princelet Editions, 1990)Google Scholar, paragraph/thought 138.
20 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.; London: Kegan Paul, 1922), p. 89Google Scholar. This line has been alternatively translated as ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’. Wittgenstein, , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Pears, D.F. and McGuinness, B.F. (Henley-on-Thames: Routledge & Kegan, Paul, 1961)Google Scholar.
21 Beckett, Samuel, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983)Google Scholar, p. 7.