Everything is ridiculous

“Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death” (“Es ist alles lächerlich, wenn man an den Tod denkt”) is what the author Thomas Bernhard said when he was awarded an Austrian national prize in 1968. For the last five years his writing has been a major influence on my own work and this piece was an opportunity to set a small fragment as a strange type of thank you for his help. The actual music began life as a short chorale I wrote on St. Patrick’s Day 2008 and have used in other works since then. In this new version for choir the chorale is revealed one chord at a time systematically but the rhythm is always being manipulated so that is ends up as a machine that is constantly being destroyed by human intervention. The work was commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland and the Cork International Choral Festival in 2009. (Andrew Hamilton)