Composer Donnacha Dennehy introduces Land of Winter, his 2026 Grammy Award-winning work inspired by cycles of time, light and renewal, to be performed by his long-time artistic collaborators Crash Ensemble at this year's New Music Dublin festival on 18 April.
Land of Winter is almost certainly the largest purely instrumental piece I've composed. It lasts just under an hour, and I knew even when I set out to write it that it would be something monumental. The beginnings of the idea came to me in Reykjavík, where I was doing the final mix of my piece Tessellatum - for violas and eleven microtonally adjusted viola da gambas - on the shortest day of the year, 21 December.
I remember rising in darkness, the sun slowly lifting, shrouded in clouds, as we worked in a studio in the suburbs of that beautiful city. By the time we broke for a late lunch, the light was already fading, slipping back into darkness. It instantly brought me back to Irish winters and that particular battle with the light that defines the months from November to January. At that point, I had just moved to America, living in Princeton, about forty miles south of New York City, where the variation in daylight across the year is far less extreme. It would be a few more years before I acted on this intuition and finally sat down to write Land of Winter. In the meantime, the idea - and its implications - quietly percolated in the back of my mind.
The Romans referred to Ireland as Hibernia - the "land of winter"- believing that the inhabited world ended in the northwest with a country that never knew summer. Of course, we now understand that, in global terms, Irish winters are not especially severe (certainly not in comparison to the subzero temperatures of the northeastern United States), but they are undeniably dark. I often feel that it is the quality of light, more than temperature, that truly demarcates the seasons: from the short days of grey or piercing light in winter to the warmer, mercurial brightness of summer, when daylight stretches almost to midnight at the solstice. This interplay between light and time is the central inspiration behind the piece.
Ultimately, I think of Land of Winter as both a celebration of cyclical time - yielding more with each hearing - and an expression of unease in the face of linear time and its inexorable movement toward death.
Structurally, the work unfolds across twelve continuously connected "months," beginning in December and culminating at the end of November, ready to begin again. Solstices and equinoxes are translated musically through overtone distributions across the ensemble, creating sweeping gradations of colour and shade in the aural space. An Advent chorale by Bach that I have long loved - Wie soll ich dich empfange - occasionally surfaces beneath the texture, shaping the larger harmonic motion. At times, it functions as a generator of upper partials that linger after the chorale itself has receded, like glowing embers after a fire has burned out.
In the final movement, November, the chorale gradually emerges in looping frames, forming a new, slowly evolving modal harmony from its reconstituted chronology. It unfolds slowly enough - and with sufficient reordering - that its origins may be difficult to discern. Yet it underpins a kind of transforming resonance, one that embraces winter as a necessary slowing within the cycle of the year.
It has often been the case that the pieces most meaningful to me did not begin as commissions, and that I had to will their circumstances into being. I was very fortunate that the wonderful American ensemble Alarm Will Sound were so eager to help realise this work. In the end, I was also honoured to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship to support its composition. The piece was later nominated for two Grammy Awards and won Best Chamber Music Performance at the 2026 Grammys. Land of Winter is dedicated to Alan Pierson - erstwhile conductor of Crash Ensemble and founder, as well as current artistic director and conductor, of Alarm Will Sound.
Ultimately, I think of Land of Winter as both a celebration of cyclical time - yielding more with each hearing - and an expression of unease in the face of linear time and its inexorable movement toward death. These two forces interact constantly throughout the piece. I’m reminded of a line from Samuel Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue, which has long resonated with me: "Thirty thousand nights. Hard to believe so few."
A double bill at this year's New Music Dublin, taking place on April 18th at the National Concert Hall brings together two distinctive strands of contemporary Irish music, pairing an intimate collaborative performance by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh and Seán Mac Erlaine with the Dublin premiere of Donnacha Dennehy's Land of Winter, performed by Crash Ensemble - find out more here
