Solo Archives - Seán Doherty Music

Ricercare

Sean Doherty — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:12:15 +0000

Ricercare means ‘to search’ or ‘seek out’. The genre has its roots in imitative keyboard works of the late
Renaissance. Like scholarly research, it takes a subject and examines it again and again, from all angles, up
and down, front and back, in ever smaller fragments, before viewing it as a whole once more. The
combination of logic and passion is what makes great research. This piece is a tribute to the musicologist
Ita Beausang, who has spent a lifetime researching many aspects of music in Ireland.

https://seandohertymusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Doherty_Ricercare_Piano-Solo_2024.mp3

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Clandeboye Overture (Solo Piano)

Sean Doherty — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 11:16:27 +0000

This overture celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Clandeboye festival in 2021. This celebration is tempered with sorrow as this will be the first festival after the death of the festival’s patroness, Lindy Guinness. This overture begins with a lament for all those who died during the pandemic. The lament shifts to a wild and irreverent dance, a festival atmosphere to mark the return of live music and a party to celebrate the memory of those we mourn.

https://seandohertymusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Doherty_Clandeboye-Overture_2022_Version-for-Solo-Piano.mp3

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Bridal Song

Sean Doherty — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 22:02:04 +0000

From a twenty-first century perspective, the use of a war as a metaphor for the tender embrace of the wedding night is perplexing, if not shocking. Not so in Tudor times, when war was seen as a glorious act, and romantic love often compared, favourably, to conquest and colonization—pursuits that defined the age. The martial metaphor was a common trope in the work of the metaphysical poets, as seen in John Donne’s To His Mistress Going to Bed:

O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!

Anachronistic hand-wringing it may be, from our vantage point after centuries of the civilising process, but I cannot celebrate the idea of romantic love as domination, or of war as an uniquely honourable endeavour. Hence the song’s sinister tone. The accompaniment contains figurations inspired by the keyboard piece ‘The Battell’ from My Ladye Nevells Booke by the Tudor composer William Byrd.

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Divisions II

Sean Doherty — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 20:32:04 +0000

In music, ‘division’ refers to a type of ornamentation or variation common in 16^th and 17^th -century music in which each note of a melody is ‘divided’ into several shorter, faster-moving notes. These is a new take on this old compositional technique. In Divisions II, the violin is divided lengthways, along the middle of the fingerboard, with the resonance of bottom two strings pitted against the brilliance of the upper two strings.

Seán Doherty · Divisions II

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Divisions I

Sean Doherty — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 19:51:27 +0000

Divisions is a catalogue of Baroque techniques and motifs, that took initial inspiration from the improvisatory genre of ‘divisions on a ground’. It follows a single duration, the semibreve, through all its subdivisions—crotchet, quaver, semiquaver, triplet, quintuplet, sextuplet—to the semidemiquaver. Similarly, a single interval, the semitone, is developed into the passus duriusculus, a descending chromatic fourth, which serves to link each division thematically. It was inspired by the long line of violin virtuosi, a tradition that began in the Baroque era and is continued today by Claire Duff.

Seán Doherty · Divisions

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