This piece is composed as a companion to Joan Trimble’s Sonatina. Trimble (1915–2000) was born in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. She formed a piano duo with her sister, Valerie, with whom she enjoyed a highly successful professional partnership for over thirty years. Joan’s reputation as a composer was cemented by the publication of her Sonatina for Two Pianos (1940). This new Sonatina also explores neo-classical genres and gestures. It is written in memory of my brother, Brendan.

Night carries much symbolic weight in the German song tradition: in Schoenberg’s ​Verklärte Nacht it is a liminal time in which societal mores are suspended; in Schubert’s ​Nacht und Träume it is a place to find refuge in dreams. ​Night Piece is inspired by Samuel Beckett’s last television play, ​Nacht ​und Träume (1982). In this wordless play the only sound is that of a voice humming the final bars of Schubert’s lied of the same name, originally sung to the words ‘Holde Träume, kehret wieder!’ (‘​Sweet dreams, come back​!’). Beckett conveys a feeling of deep pathos amid the silence and stillness. In ​Night Piece the final bars of ‘​Nacht ​und Träume’ return and mark the Dreamer’s passage through the various stages of sleep in which different types of dreams occur. Our inchoate desires reveal themselves in these half-forgotten dreams—the desire ​for atonement, for forgiveness, for consolation, for acceptance. This is not a lullaby but a howl of protest to be left alone in dreams, safe from reality, and enveloped in night.

Sir William Edward Parry (1790–1855) was an English explorer of the Arctic known for his expeditions to find the Northwest Passage. He and his crew were ice-bound for long periods of these expeditions, during which time Parry became acquainted with the indigenous Inuit people and their music. An adept violinist, he published an account of their music with his own transcriptions: ‘I wrote down from their singing, I can only promise that the notes are correctly given, and that I have done my best to put them into the time in which they are sung.’

Parry found the local Inuit to be a musical people, as he remarked that ‘they have most of them so far good ears, that in whatever key a song is commenced by one of them, the others join in perfect unison.’ The concept of fixed pitch was clearly as foreign to the Inuits as was Parry himself. Though effortless for the locals, it proved challenging for the foreigner who found the lack of a fixed pitch ‘…made it difficult with most of them to complete the writing of the notes, for if they once left off they were sure to re-commence in some other key, though a flute or violin was playing at the same time.’

The Arctic Violin ​follows Parry’s journey among the vast ice sheets, where he hears traditional Inuit song for the first time. One of his transcriptions serves as the theme. Despite his musical skill, Parry struggles to learn the song: he pieces motifs together from different keys and is unable to locate the right key in which the Inuit are currently singing, changing as it does with each performance. Later, he plucks the song quietly while making his transcription, then plays it through to make sure that he has notated the song correctly. Parry’s violin is displayed at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

This work is collection of three contemporaneous responses to the Easter Rising, imagined as an interconnected Aisling or ‘dream’—a genre of political poem in which the poet, asleep, sees a vision of a beautiful young woman, who represents Ireland. She tells the poet of her sadness at being repressed by foreigners and seeks the poet’s help to free the country. In this modern aisling, the allegorical spéirbhean (sky-woman) embodies the fierce spirit of the radical revolutionary poet Lola Ridge (1873–1941), who only laments that she is not in Dublin to mount the barricades (The Tidings, Easter 1916). In her Sojourn in the Whale, Marianne Moore (1887–1972) tells Ireland that the injustice and indignities she endured and endures are unbearable; Ireland has passed the point of no return by entering the belly of the beast.

In his Lament for the Poets, Francis Ledwidge (1887–1917) sees the spéirbhean in her incarnation as the sean-bhean bhocht (the poor old woman), mourning the loss of her ‘blackbirds’, which represent the Nationalist rebels—in particular, Ledwidge’s friend and fellow poet, Thomas MacDonagh—who have been destroyed by the ‘fowler’, the British Empire, and their loss is lamented by Ireland in her lowliest guise. I have used the traditional Irish slow air The Lament for Staker Wallace in the final movement. Patrick ‘Staker’ Wallace was an Irish freedom fighter, brutally executed for pro-independence activities in 1798, who gained his moniker posthumously, when his decapitated head was hoisted onto a stake to discourage further insurrection. As the original lyrics of this air are long since lost, Lament for the Poets serves as a contrafactum.
Premiere Performance Recording