The Given Note

For 2 hurdy-gurdies, great bass recorder, voice and electronics
Text: Seamus Heaney
Air: Port na bPúcai
Commissioned by Férdia Stone-Davis for the launch of Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object

Premiered Thursday 2 December 2010

The Given Note is a setting of the poem of the same name by Seamus Heaney. The poem recounts the story of a fiddler from the Blasket Islands who extracts the Port na bPúcai (The Fairies' Tune) from his surroundings. Although the tune is perceived in its entirety by the fiddler, it is barely perceptible to others. This setting explores the attentiveness to experience alluded to in the text, of perceiving the world afresh and striving to articulate this.