Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- Donnacha Dennehy
Streetwalker (2003)
- G Schirmer Inc (World)
Programme Note
Listen on Spotify
Composer Note:
I have often had a fascination with a kind of urban sonic energy which mixes intellectual concerns with streetwise attitudes and sounds. When writing the piece, I entertained an image of passing through streets of buildings at some speed. There are large movements of dynamic change, for instance registral and harmonic collapses, reconstituting to form new areas of focus, but these happen often in interlocking, seemingly static terraced steps. Another image that often stole into my mind was of the constantly crashing cars in the Chrysler Building in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3. This static repetitive process strikes one as strangely ritualistic, but it produces a very dynamic result ultimately.
In terms of technical details, I can tell you that over the last few years I’ve become more and more interested in particular usages of microtones to enliven my harmonies (in a spectral way) at important points and to articulate various kinds of discrete glissandos. These microtonal developments are integrated within the rhythmic and harmonic energy of my music.
The piece was commissioned by WNYC Radio New York (through John Schaefer’s New Sounds Series) for Bang On A Can and was originally premiered by them in 2003.
— Donnacha Dennehy, Dublin, 2003