breacadh an lae (brightening of the day)
for orchestra [2222.4231.timp.2 perc.harp.strings]
Commissioned by L’Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, Clemens Schuldt Music Director
Premiering November 2026 in Quebec, Canada
Program Note: After many years of feeling not particularly connected or grounded to the place where I live, I have been seeking to live more deeply in place – to know my world, not as a backdrop. At the same time, I have become increasingly aware that my mother’s and father’s culture connect me to other places deep and profound – but where exactly, I am not sure. These distant landscapes feel elusive.
The St. Lawrence River near Rimouski, the Pacific Ocean near Vancouver, the ocean surrounding Ireland all occupy an important place in my imagination. I now seem ready to carry my family’s haunting inside, ready to inhabit these places and languages that are less familiar to me. I am interested in what we leave behind, and what our family leaves behind. My current orchestral compositions are an exploration of place – both tangible and intangible – that is handed down by our families, often through many generations.
The languages we speak impact our experience of the world, making us see the same things in different ways. In Irish, “breacadh an lae” describes a brightening of the day, a particular moment of dawn. I find myself imagining what this brightening might mean in places of importance to my family’s history.
As this composition opens the Brahms Festival, I connect my work to Johannes Brahms’s Hungarian Dances through rhythms transformed and lengthened to create echoes of his textures. Brahms’s music was shaped by encounters with places and traditions beyond his homeland. In my own way, I am drawn to similar questions of belonging, inheritance, and memory. Through composing I am drawn to excavate identity and memory, and uncover my family’s buried history – reviving places and identities lost to me.