The initial ideas for this piece came at the end of 1994 when I was working at Stanford University, California. It was only a matter of weeks after the cease-fires had been declared in Northern Ireland and several months since our local butcher in Crossgar had been murdered; both these events had been on my mind and for the first time I felt a strong desire to comment in some way on the troubles which have blighted all our lives for so many years. Macha’s Curse is a personal response to this. It is a work without political, programmatic or symbolic references. Instead it attempts to capture some of the complex emotions which have touched so many lives in the Province.
The work is in two large sections. The first section is fast and homophonic, the second is an interlocking series of slower homophonic blocks which draw harmonic and rhythmic ideas from the first section. Across the span of the piece there is a general thinning of musical material; the dense, high-pitched harmonies of the opening eventually become widely spaced timbres and single lines in the closing bars.
Macha is a mythological figure in Irish history who, in one of her tales, is forced to run a race against the horses of king Conor mac Nessa. She is pregnant with the twins of Crundchu at the time. She outruns the horses but is seized with the pangs of childbirth. As revenge she casts upon Ulster a curse for nine times nine generations.
The work is in two large sections. The first section is fast and homophonic, the second is an interlocking series of slower homophonic blocks which draw harmonic and rhythmic ideas from the first section. Across the span of the piece there is a general thinning of musical material; the dense, high-pitched harmonies of the opening eventually become widely spaced timbres and single lines in the closing bars.
Macha is a mythological figure in Irish history who, in one of her tales, is forced to run a race against the horses of king Conor mac Nessa. She is pregnant with the twins of Crundchu at the time. She outruns the horses but is seized with the pangs of childbirth. As revenge she casts upon Ulster a curse for nine times nine generations.