The Given Note
The Given Note (2024)
The Given Note is the title of a poem that Seamus Heaney wrote inspired by a haunting Irish tune called Port NaBpúcai. It translates as Song of the Spirits (or Fairies). According to legend, it was composed long ago by a lone fiddler on one of the Blasket Islands off the coast of Western Ireland.
I wrote this piece to commemorate the opening of the Prior Center at Holy Cross. I wanted to honor the dream and vision of Neil and Trudie Prior, and the magnificent creation of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, by composing a work in which the emotion is evoked less by the sentiment of the tunes than by the architecture of the music: the proportions among all its elements. I explore two kinds of architecture here: the fluid architecture of dreams and the cosmos, and the human-made “geometrical” architecture represented in this building.