Composer Donnacha Dennehy, whose piece Land of Winter, performed by Alarm Will Sound and conductor Alan Pierson, was released earlier this month on Nonesuch, shares some insight on the work, which explores the subtleties of Ireland’s seasons via twelve connected sections representing the months of the year.

It feels increasingly important to me to celebrate winter in this era where our climate is under threat from an expanding and unpredictable heat. Some of that feeling inspired my composing Land of Winter, though I’d long been planning a large piece around the Roman conception of my homeland. The Romans referred to Ireland as Hibernia—the “land of winter”—believing that the inhabited world ended in the northwest with this country that never knew summer. It is the varying quality of light that truly demarcates the seasons, from the shorter days of grey or piercing light in the winter to the warmer but mercurial light of summer days that at solstice stretch almost to midnight. I like this sense of time being delineated by light, and it is the major inspiration behind the piece.

Though Land of Winter happens in an unbroken arc, structurally the piece can be considered as divided into twelve “months” connecting to each other continuously. While undoubtedly the sense of each month influences the music within, there is also a kind of deeper reflection on the interaction between recurring and linear, irreversible time. The sense of time being experienced in radically different ways—based on the way we perceive content—is important.

DECEMBER

The piece starts in December, and culminates at the end of November, ready to begin all over again in winter, as it were. The solstices and equinoxes are translated musically using overtone distributions throughout the ensemble, where each instrument peaks and subsides differently, creating sweeps of color and shade across the aural space. December starts with such an approach, concentrating on the higher harmonics especially. It feels cold, crystalline, and translucent with darkness enveloping it.

JANUARY

January is the first of the three “refrain” movements that act as markers for where we are in the year. Here the height of winter is evoked by a kind of isolated, icy sound, with the middle range of the instrumentation hollowed out. Some of the lower instruments consist entirely of patterns of dancing brittle upper harmonics, while others such as the contrabassoon create a deep bass, and very few occupy the middle ground. The lonely oscillating melody, played by a muted solo violin, draws on abstracted ornamentations from the Irish sean-nós (“old-style”) vocal tradition.

FEBRUARY

February presents the most pared-back manifestation of a rhythmic approach that I use often in the piece where pairs—or threes—of rhythms stretch and contract against each other, usually dancing around an elusive symmetry. In February, all ornamentation is stripped away to present these rhythms in a viscerally stark way, like a copse of trees, bare of their leaves.

MARCH

The swirls of March coalesce eventually into an overtone-hued luminous space, the first musical equinox of the work. The strings have a ferociously difficult part in this movement, and Alarm Will Sound carry it off with aplomb. Occasionally the swirls twist off into ferocious detuning patterns that spark off each other.

APRIL

This second refrain movement is warmer than the first, with much more activity in the middle tessitura, but it is also more volatile. An advent chorale by Bach that I have long loved, Wie soll ich dich empfangen, which incidentally has also been used by Bach to represent Easter, albeit with different words, has lurked behind the surface occasionally so far, influencing the larger harmonic motions. By the time we reach April, its influence is more pervasive, and I use it to generate upper partials that remain on the musical surface after the chorale itself is erased, just like the glowing embers that might remain after a fire has burned out. The idea of process plays out a lot in this piece, and here it undergirds the fluctuating surface of this month.

MAY

The entire work abounds with all sorts of rhythmic contractions and expansions, sometimes working in conjunction with the opening-up or closing-in of the overtone flowerings of the harmony, sometimes not. In May, I have a lot of fun with expanding phrases of notes and rhythms, mirroring the way growth explodes exponentially in this quintessential month of spring! When we were rehearsing this movement in advance of its premiere at Beethovenfest in Bonn in September 2022, Alarm Will Sound started scatting one of the passages in order to get the rhythm right. I so loved the raw power of the shouting voices in rehearsal that I incorporated it immediately into the piece. Something about the earthy excitement just seemed so apt that I abandoned the notes I had spent a long time laboring over in favor of the unleashed quality of the vocalization!

JUNE

June is a month I love. I revel in its growing warmth and its promise of a slower sense of time. In this movement, a set of notes influenced by a stretched version of the phrase “Táim sínte” (I’m stretched), in the Irish sean-nós song of the same name, evolve gradually into a spectrum of overtones resting on the dividing summer solstice of the work. I really wanted to create a sense of warmth by superimposing harmonies and patterns of different lengths and spans on top of each other in this movement.

JULY

Bouncy and bittersweet, July came easy. Where in New Jersey or New York, July can be oppressively hot; in Ireland, this month is a delight, full of activity from the radically expanded daylight. Maybe a slight regret creeps in at its denouement, as one already feels by the end of the month that the evenings are only going to contract from here. We may feel this contraction seasonally, and also, after experiencing many seasons, as a turning point in our life!

AUGUST

The melodic material from July turns microtonal at the start of August so that it fits entirely within a prevailing overtone series that pervades the movement. Gradually these overtones stretch out and bands of them are layered on top of each other at different speeds, like clouds heavy with moisture hovering over each other.

SEPTEMBER

September hits with a surge of monolithic pulses, creating a very present vibrating sense of existing inside a throbbing spectrum of light or sound. When one hears it live, it feels like the very hall is resonating to its pulse. It has a kind of urgency, further highlighted when the pulses begin to glissando internally. It eventually subsides into a musical analogue of the autumn equinox by its conclusion.

OCTOBER

The third of the refrain movements—October—returns to the more hollowed-out world of January, in anticipation of returning winter, but now shifts much more harmonically, auguring in the expanding chorale of November with which it merges.

NOVEMBER

In the final movement, November, the chorale Wie soll ich dich empfangen is finally revealed in its fundamental harmonies. But it emerges gradually in looping frames that create a new evolving modal harmony out of its re-constituted chronology. It moves slowly enough, and with sufficient changes of order, that you might be hard pressed to hear the traces of the original here. Yet the chorale underpins a kind of transforming resonance, embracing winter as a necessary slowing down within the year. It shifts to overtone tuning again at the very end, at the cusp of December potentially returning.

Ultimately, I think of Land of Winter as being both a celebration of recurring time—yielding more and more on each listening—but also something written in fear of the power of linear time, the progress towards death. The two forces are forever interacting with each other through the piece. There’s a phrase from Samuel Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue that resonates with me, and I often think it has provoked a lot of music from me: “Thirty-thousand nights. Hard to believe so few.”

—Donnacha Dennehy