Dennehy DIRTY LIGHT 56525

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Dirty Light – program note

Dirty Light (2013) was commissioned by Ensemble Lucilin in Luxembourg and premiered by them in September 2013. It makes use of a number of different overtone series in order to create a more varied harmonic palette than earlier pieces of mine employing the overtone series as the basis for the pitch material (such as my piano trio, Bulb). Rhythmically too, Dirty Light is more splintered, diffracted and volatile. As the piece proceeds the sense of cohesion projected by the pulsating D-based overtone series of the opening is constantly disrupted, both in terms of overtone content and rhythmic focus.

Any platonic notions of overtone perfection are being stained by real-life experience, as it were!

Figure 1 A more diffracted approach to overtone-based material in Dirty Light.