Woven (2025)

Composer note
I often associate the sounds of sewing, knitting, the making and fixing of clothes generally, with my childhood home. As I started to develop ideas for this piece, I was haunted by the sound of our Singer sewing machine, most definitely transformed and transmogrified in my imagination in the intervening years. My mother was always an avid stitcher, sewer and knitter when we were growing up. She still knits to this day, and I actually think it's a kind of meditation for her, to lose herself in the rhythm of it. It seems to me that happiness may come from activities that take you out of yourself, from losing oneself in the momentum of a tune at a session to the various rhythms of quotidian creativity such as knitting scarves and so on! As I was writing this duet for cellist and marimbist, I kept coming back to the interesting binary qualities of textile making, from the stitches in knitting to the structure of a loom that sustains tension across its two main beams. These tactile binary systems inspired the interactions between the two players in this piece as they intersect to create something needing them both. Woven is in three movements - I. Knit, II. Thread and III. Loom. The two faster, intricately interlocking, outer movements reflect on each other and encase a more intimate and unfolding central movement. Woven was written especially for the marimbist Ji Hye Jung and cellist Guy Johnston for the Westport Festival of Chamber Music in Ireland. As part of the process, Catherine Leonard, the director of the festival, had the wonderful idea that we would convene in the South of France for a workshop in the latter stages of the composition.  This turned out to be inspired and had a galvanizing influence on the final shape of the piece.

— Donnacha Dennehy