Selected composition extracts
Wexford Women (2025)
Soundscape of women’s voices sharing what they associate with being a woman. Multiple languages and cultural expression highlight the individuality of womanhood.
“The Bog, the Canal and other magical things” (2024)
Soundscapes using field recordings, interviews and composed music set the scene for the three act play focussed on the themes of the bog, canal and town. This extract opens with a field recording of the bog. Wind turbines with their whirr and sometimes cracking sound can be heard. This moves into a lament played on the oboe which moves into a dynamic wind ensemble building up the bog motif that will reoccur throughout the performance.
“Put it to me in the kitchen” (2024)
This extract from a song uses highly evocative and descriptive language drawn from interviews to create lyrics. Interviews and co-creation allowed communities to share their stories around flooding. A rhythmic polyphonic motif was worked up into a performance piece where each of the eight voices moved independently within the choral space.
“In by midnight, gone by morning” (2024)
This extract gives a flavour of the immersive installation that provides an account of a flood in 2017 drawn from flood affected communities and told in their voices. The title of the installation references one community member’s description of how the flood water came and went within a matter of hours in darkness. It includes sonified climate data around rainfall.
“Zeit, Licht…” (2020)
A sound piece composed through bricolage. Voices of actors improvising in response to key themes of the stage piece. A bass line around discordant sounds lends the piece an air of discomfort in order to bring the audience into a particular level of attention in the ‘here and now’ This piece began as the lights in the auditorium went down and the audience sat in darkness. The themes included Time, Light and Dark. The actors were encouraged to use their voices in any way they chose to make free associations with the words after having found multiple ways of interacting with the word itself.
“Universe Hopscotch: a musical guide through the universe” (2019)
Drawing on material and ideas generated during and after a Leverhulme Artist in Residence at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland (2015-17). It uses musicalized sonifications drawing on NASA recordings to represent things that might be encountered on a travel through space. It is intended to give the listener some spatial awareness of the geography of the Universe with the known limits being the edge of the visible universe, with an unknown beyond which requires quantum physics and a theory of quantum gravity to be developed if it is ever to be explored.
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