I am a composer from County Donegal now living in County Armagh. I focus mainly on solo instrumental and chamber music, however, I have written for a wide range of forces including electroacoustic, choral, mixed ensemble, and orchestral. I have won a number of awards, including the West Cork Chamber Music Composition Competition for 2009 (piano trio section), and I received a PhD in composition from Queen’s University Belfast in July 2014, having studied with Professor Piers Hellawell.
This piece explores the idea of repetitiveness in daily life. Focusing on my own experience of groundhog day syndrome I reflected on the struggle of breaking away from my normal routines and rituals to attempt to fit in time for composing. This is explored in the piece through a theme and variations format where a few different ideas are repeated and developed throughout. In keeping with the underlying theme, this piece is somewhat a variation, or reimagining, of my first piano trio, which also begins with a short motif on the piano and uses canon and contrapuntal writing to develop my material. One idea I attempted to explore in this piece was the experience of time and, in particular, the idea that time seems to speed up as we age. This is explored through the use of accelerando (the music getting faster) and there are a few places where the note values/lengths of one of the instrumentalists get progressively shorter.
