Through the Digital Door: International Women's Day 2025
For this edition of Through the Digital Door to observe International Women’s Day, which just passed on March 8th, we are delighted to share our new Scholar-in-Residence, Laura Sheils’ selection from the CMC catalogue. Over to you, Laura!
In celebration of International Women’s Day, I chose a selection of choral music by CMC-represented composers Rhona Clarke, Emma O’Halloran, Éna Brennan, and Anne-Marie O’Farrell.
Rhona Clarke (b. 1958): O Vis Aeternitatis (2020)
Rhona Clarke’s compositional career has spanned four decades, with an output of choral, chamber, orchestral, and electronic music, and commissions and performances nationally and internationally. Since 2009 she has been collaborating with visual artist Marie Hanlon, including short experimental films with music, live music with visual projections and joint exhibitions.
Our first piece, O Vis Aeternitatis, is taken from Sempiternam, a CD of Clarke’s choral music performed by State Choir LATVIJA, conducted by their artistic director Maris Sirmais. It was released in February 2022 by Métier to much critical acclaim.
Clarke’s O Vis Aeternitatis sets a text by the Medieval composer and saint Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), who also composed music for the Latin words. Clarke captures the visceral spirit of Hildegard’s words through her gradual expansion of texture, antiphony, dissonance, and contrasting vocal timbres, spotlighting moments of dramatic escalation and spiritual importance in the text. She also draws closely on Hildegard’s melody, opening the piece with an elongated melisma reflecting the original chant. The final section features an exuberant fugal treatment of the half-doxology ‘Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto’.
Image credit: LATVIJA Valsts Akadēmiskais Koris
O Vis Aeternitatis was commissioned by Music for Galway for the Abendmusik series and premiered by Resurgam in November 2020. The work was selected as one of three Irish works to be performed at the ISCM World New Music Days festival in the Faroe Islands in 2024. You can read more about the festival here, and you can hear more about Irish composers’ presence there on episode 111 of CMC’s podcast amplify.
For further insight into Rhona Clarke’s choral music and the State Choir Latvija’s album Sempiternam, listen to a conversation with the composer on episode 64 of amplify.
Emma O’Halloran (b. 1985): Natural History (2015, rev. 2022)
Next, we have Emma O’Halloran’s Natural History for mixed choir, a setting of extracts from naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace’s ‘The Malay Archipelago’, published in 1869.
Image credit: Emma O’Halloran – ‘Natural History’ (2015 rev. 2022) for SSATB Choir | Score Follower
The text used in Natural History focuses on specific numbers of specimens of various creatures, including reptiles, birds, and insects. The pedal tones and parallel fourths and fifths generate an archaic tone in the music, while the jaunty syncopated rhythms and indeterminate sections ensure a contemporary account of Wallace’s discoveries. As the piece progresses, O’Halloran juxtaposes individual passages of text in a denser, polyrhythmic texture, creating a dialogue between the upper and lower voices, and capturing the excitement of the naturalist on his travels. Originally written for Gallicantus in 2015, the work was revised for SSATB forces and performed by Mornington Singers in November 2022.
Éna Brennan (b. 1990): L’Étranger (2011)
Éna Brennan is a Dublin-based composer, arranger, violinist and graphic designer, originally from Brussels. In recent years she has become involved in the world of opera, writing a micro-opera for the Irish National Opera project "20 Shots of Opera" as well as a short immersive piece as part of her participation in INO’s artistic development programme, The ABL Aviation Opera Studio. In 2024, she was commissioned to write a larger work, Hold Your Breath, in collaboration with Sir David Pountney and visual artist Hugo Canoilas, premiered in the Werkstattbühne in August 2024 in partnership with Bregenz Festival and Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria.
L’Étranger (The Stranger) is a setting of the opening poem of Charles Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose (1869) for mixed choir (SSAATTBB) and Solo Quartet, premiered by Trinity Singers and conducted by Roisin Blunnie on April 2nd, 2012. This recording is taken from that premier concert.
Brennan’s piece has an ethereal quality, which captures the searching words and image of clouds within the text. Aleatoric, melismatic passages return throughout the choral texture, ‘floating like whispers in the summer sun’ and creating a nebulous ambience. The choir’s soft, sustained harmonies and melodic undulations provide a delicate carpet over which the quartet vocalists perform in solo, two-part, and four-part forms.
L’Étranger features on the Mornington Singer’s Under-Song album of music by Irish composers (2011).
Anne-Marie O’Farrell (b. 1966): Praise the Lord of Love (2009)
The last work for this edition of Through the Digital Door is Praise the Lord of Love for upper voices and percussion by Dublin composer Dr Anne-Marie O’Farrell, who has a substantial output of works for orchestra, mixed choir, solo vocal, chamber and instruments to her name. Her works have been performed nationally and internationally by many orchestras, ensembles and solo artists. O’Farrell’s civil war cantata, Who’d Ever Think It Would Come to This? was a resounding critical success following its premiere by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Resurgam and vocal soloists, conducted by Ciarán Crilly.
Praise the Lord of Love was commissioned by St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral Girls’ Choir and their conductor Blánaid Murphy as part of the celebrations to mark ten years since the choir’s foundation in 2009. The piece was premiered on June 8th, 2019 and features on the choir’s album Vox Feminina II, released in 2024.
O’Farrell’s contemporary, joyous setting inspired by Psalm 148 expresses praise to the Lord through the vivacious tempo, syncopated rhythms, canonic writing, and body and hand-held percussion.
St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral Girls’ Choir has commissioned and recorded many works by female composers to celebrate their respective tenth and fifteenth anniversaries. As well as O’Farrell’s work, Vox Feminina II, which marks the choir’s fifteenth year, features music by Irish composers Eibhlís Farrell, Mary Kelly, and myself, Laura Sheils.