RIPIENO
In the Baroque concerto grosso, the term ripieno referred to the full orchestra as opposed to the concertino or group of soloists. I chose the word as the title of this large-scale work without a soloist, as so many of my earlier orchestral compositions had been of a concertante nature, and I wished to avoid the compromising terms symphony or concerto for orchestra. However, given its etymological proximity to replenish, the title evokes the possibility of an aesthetic of plenitude as against one of impoverishment; of dialectic, drama and perspective as opposed to the flat surface of post-modernism. Can this be done without lapsing into nostalgia? Ripieno sketches four possible answers - which may themselves be questions.
Part I begins with a hushes trio for flutes, adumbrating much of the pitch-material on which the work will be based. The entry of lower strings touches a chord that will recur at key points of each movement and that I nick-named the golden chord, although I have never explored whether its occurrences correspond in any way to the mathematical golden section (which I have used consciously in certain other works). The music speeds up and becomes hectic before yielding to a hushed passage alternating celesta and solo strings. This in turn yields to a recurrence of the hectic material which brings the movement to a forceful close.
Part II is a kind of "Intermezzo" whose ingredients include fragments of Klangfarbenmelodie, staccato chords in the low registers, arpeggios in woodwind and pitches percussion, and a good deal of elaborate layering of the string ensemble. 
Part III is a frenetic, fragmented "Scherzo" in which pitched percussion and piano - a kind of "gamelan from hell" - function almost as a concertino against the rest of the orchestra. The pitch-structure is characterised by gapped scales and superimposed major and minor thirds, thus anticipating Samara.
Part IV - the longest movement - is a kind of Passacaglia in which each section is centred on one of 14 pitches which are stated at the outset by celesta and harp. The apparent clarity of this scheme is progressively muddied and elements from Part I infiltrate the flow. Somewhere in the back of my mind were W. B. Yeats's  lines "what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" However, at the end of Ripieno the beast is transformed into shimmering light and disappears into the ether.
The first sketches for Ripieno date from November 1998. Part III, the last to be composed, was sketched in September 1999. The work uses a normal large orchestra - triple woodwind, eleven brass, percussion (without timpani), pianoforte/celesta, harp and strings. The work is dedicated to Colman Pearce, who conducted the premiere on 14 April 2000 and who has tirelessly promoted the cause of new Irish music.
					
				SAMARA

The samara is the winged seed of certain trees, disseminated by the wind. In the context of this piece, it refers specifically to certain musical figures evoking the seed's flight, and more generally to the transmission and transformation of generative musical ideas through history, through my own output (there are references to a number of earlier works), and through the piece itself.
My only starting-points were the intention to foreground major and minor thirds (exploring both the consonant and dissonant possibilities of their combination), and the certainty that a fleeting musical idea would ultimately be transformed into an explosion of fanfares. Other musical ideas accrued in the process of composition: the opening linear music which recurs like a refrain, a repeated chord in the brass, repetitive drum rhythms derived from Arabic music, and an extrovert melody employing all twelve notes of the scale. Finally, all seeds dispersed, only the wind remains.
Samara was begun in Dublin on 10 April 2005 and completed at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, on 22 July 2005. It is dedicated to Gerhard Markson and the members of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland.
			VIOLIN  CONCERTO
My Violin Concerto was commissioned by RTÉ for the Danish violinist Christine Pryn, to whom it is dedicated. It was composed in four intense bouts corresponding to its four movements, roughly between April 2002 and May 2003, separated by periods of “extra-curricular” - i.e. political - activity. 
Although I have composed a half dozen or so concertante works, only the Oboe Concerto previously (1993-4) bore the straightforward generic title, and the two works are both linked and opposed. To a greater extent than its predecessor, each movement of the Violin Concerto is an odyssey towards its solo cadenza, and the cadenzas recall 19th century models to an almost parodistic extent. Throughout, the tonality of A minor periodically intrudes unexpectedly and threateningly, as do moments of unbridled chaos. If there is a "programme" involved, however, it is a purely musical one, the protagonists being the performers and the musical ideas.
Whereas the orchestra in the earlier work functioned as oppressor and finally “crushed” the exiled soloist, collective and individual have here attained a less fractious co-existence, and the work ends with the soloist’s – albeit slightly demented – liberation. The orchestra itself is much smaller: 10 woodwind, 7 brass, percussion, piano, harp and strings. The overall shape of the work could be described as “two preludes, scherzo, and finale.”
The “soupy” major sixths with which the soloist begins soon turn into the minor thirds of Schubert’s Der Leiermann, the only direct quotation in the work. Here Schubert’s Wanderer, instead of meeting the death that has seemed the inevitable conclusion of his Winterreise, contemplates further wanderings in the company of a strange old man who plies his barrel organ. There follow two hallucinatory variations on this material, the first a kind of Adagio in which the thirds become tenths, the second a wild orchestral orgy without the soloist. A cadenza ushers in an uneasily peaceful conclusion.
The predominantly slow second movement looks at some of the same material, but subtracts the Schubert. The minor third that is in many ways the emblem of the entire work here briefly becomes major, a moment of rare sunniness.
The fast third movement dispenses with orchestral strings and harp, and in many ways functions like a foreign body within the work as a whole. Nonetheless, it shares essential structural elements with the other movements, notably the “birthday cell” 2,7,1,5,3 (day, month and year of my birth), which here influences both rhythm and harmony.
The finale is the longest and most elaborate movement, drawing together all the strands of the work without being either a “synthesis” or “compendium” of preceding material. At the beginning and end the piano emerges as a partner to the soloist, somewhat as in Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No 5, which happens to be the work with which Christine Pryn made her début. A double homage is implied here.