Sensation (Song Cycle) (Piano/High Voice)

Duration | 8.40

For High Voice and Piano.

Note that this order includes versions in US Letter and A4 formats. Choral version below.

Sensation (four poems by Arthur Rimbaud)
1. Sensation (1985)
2. Rêvé pour l’hiver (1986)
3. Les Effarés (1987)
4. Aube (1990)

Sensation was begun while I was in University College Dublin, where I graduated from in 1986. I premiered the first three of these (including an early version of “Les Effarés”) in J305, a small lecture theatre at the top of the Music faculty. At a time when Irish contemporary music mainly consisted of a very strong European dissonant compositional culture, I chose to create four pieces that act like salon songs. Stories being told to a room of attentive listeners and the musical language reflects that poetic language.

I am a self-taught composer, never having had access to tuition in composition, with the sum total of my compositional studies being at a week long Summer School in Ennis in the summer of 1986. I bring that up because it was there that I met, very briefly, the British composer Paul Patterson. At the end of the course he was assessing the music of the attendees. I hadn’t really engaged with the creative aspect of the course so I brought the first two of these songs along with me for him to see and my first choral piece “Triar Laoch” (1985) which had unexpectedly won the Sean Ó Riada Memorial prize at the Cork Choral Festival in 1985.

I believe that he had been quite hard on some of the other attendees, so I was pretty surprised when, after some amount of looking at the scores and playing a few things, he announced “you could make a living from this”. And I have. I was 22 at the time, and he was a true-blue professional composer working with some of the finest musicians in the world. It took a long time for me to process his words, direct and simple as they were, they gave me a massive boost of confidence that I will forever be grateful for.

I was very much out of step with what was happening in composition around me in Ireland at the time, increasingly moving away from the established compositional fashions.  So these pieces are important to me. “Sensation” begins the journey simply and evocatively, culminating in the virtuosic “Aube” that I can’t believe I once was able to play. It has to be asked (by me primarily) what would have happened if I had been embraced into the composition community at home at this stage, or even encouraged by it. Would I have developed this language more? I continue to hear echoes of it in the textures of “O Maria” (2006) and even “Ēarendel” (2023).

“Aube” remains a fascinating piece to end this cycle with – and it has to be stressed that this song was being composed concurrently with “Incantations”, one of my biggest choral “hits”, dating from the same year. Only one recording exists of the cycle and that was done by Caitríona Ó Leary and myself in 1991. Caitríona was, like me, somewhat of an outsider and her subsequent fascinating career has come as no surprise. Maybe one day these will get another performance. I would hope that they will, but in the meantime they offer a glimpse into the world that I was creating in my head as a young man.

I can’t leave this short note on this Cycle without mentioning the writing of Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891). I first came across his poetry through Les Illuminations by Benjamin Britten and I was obsessed with the tone and colour of his texts. Rimbaud’s poems overpower the listener, and if spoken in the declamatory style of French poetic tradition, are not soft and languid. These are words that overwhelm us, that force us into his manic world of fantasy and the harshest of reality.