"Marianas" for contrabass clarinet & ensemble (2022).
When Sarah Watts told me she was buying a contrabass clarinet, I immediately wanted to write something for her new instrument.
I have always been drawn to deep-registered instruments, something about the textures and colours they produce, and so with the support of the Northern Ireland Arts Council I set about composing something inspired by the Mariana Trench ('Marianas' in Spanish), the deepest place in the ocean. At those depths all is dark, the inhabitants are strange and even frightening, and there are all sorts of unusual sounds and sights. All these ideas fed into the new work, which while deep- and dark-hued, is full of colour and surprise.
Written with funds from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
The performers on this recording are Sarah Watts and the Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble.

Marianas (contrabass clarinet & ensemble)

My 15th quartet, inspired by the floods that hit Cork city in early 2014, performed by the Vanbrugh Quartet. The piece casts a cold eye on the life cycle of a flood and attempts to recreate it in music through shifting textures, densities and tessituras. The four sections in the work are Fall, Rise, Breach and Disperse. Alluvio is Latin for "the act of flooding".

Alluvio (string quartet #15)

My "Sonata for Solo Violin" (2014) is a work in three movements, titled Reeyill, Aire and Jigg, each inspired by a traditional Irish music form (reel, air, jig). The whole lasts around 15 minutes and the movements are fast, slow and fast again, with the triple metre of the final movement balancing the more duple feel of the opening. There is no ‘story’ behind the work, it is rather an exploration of how old forms can be somewhat deconstructed yet still retain something of their character.
The work's central Aire is based on an original melody of my own, written in the style of an old Irish air, the kind of thing Irish sean-nós singers might sing.

"Sonata for Solo Violin" was written for, and is dedicated to Alina Ibragimova.

Sonata for solo violin

As the quiet crow flies

Quiet Club + CrOw - As the quiet crow flies (excpt)

'Creating Evil, Face It!' is Matthew Jacobson's anagram for 'leaving certificate'Please enjoy this live excerpt of Matthew's 'Create Evil, let's Face it.'with me and F-JOB, (Cormac O Brien on bass and Greg Felton on piano).

solo on Matthew J's 'Creating Evil, Face It!' by FJOB+ Cathal Roche live @arthurs '16

'Bewitched' (2010) is the result of a 10-week period during autumn 2010 when I was Composer-in-Residence to the Stroke Unit of the Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Tallaght, Dublin. My task was to create a substantial work of music which in some way reflects the experience of both suffering and treating stroke, and to that end I was given every support by consultants and staff and allowed significant access to patients and healthcare workers while I was there. The work is a song cycle where the texts are actually segments of conversations I had with patients and healthcare workers, treated as song lyrics.

Part of the residency involved Irish soprano Deirdre Moynihan and members of the Irish Chamber Orchestra coming in to the Unit’s day hospital once a fortnight to give a lunchtime concert of light and popular music. During these visits the musicians also played the latest part of the piece I was writing in order to stimulate interest in the residency’s progress. The very first session brought home to me the fact that the initial audience for my new work would be made up almost exclusively of patients who were not necessarily regular concert-goers and therefore I needed to be able to write in such a way as to connect with whatever musical experience they had. An early visit to a group physiotherapy session provided the key - the session was light and enjoyable for the patients and in the background played a CD of music from the 1950s by artists such as the Rat Pack and Doris Day. I decided that each song I wrote would segue into a Doris Day song, thus not only providing a link to the audience’s own formative musical experiences but also giving me the opportunity to use existing music to comment on my own music; in the end these commentaries are by turns touching, moving and even humorous, but the necessity to communicate with a specific group of people led me to devise a format I would not have otherwise conceived, and it worked even better than I could have hoped.

The performers on this recording are soprano Deirdre Moynihan and members of the Irish Chamber Orchestra.

Bewitched (soprano & string quartet)

Oort Cloud, for tenor saxophone and percussion

Performed by:
Srdjan Paunovic - tenor saxophone
Darko Karlecik - percussion

Live recordings, Novi Sad 29/10/2017

Oort Cloud (2016)

About "Socrates ungraved" (2016).
I was commissioned to make a transcription/arrangement of Erik Satie’s 'Socrate' by Theater-Heilbronn in 2013 for a new stage work involving the Württembergisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn (WKO). This was a work I was not familiar with at the time but having since got to know it very well, I now believe it to be one of Satie’s finest creations. He subtitled the work a Symphonic Drama but this is typically ironic as the work is neither symphonic nor dramatic. Indeed, Satie said that he wanted the work to be “white” (meaning transparent, lucid and unimpassioned), adding that he had eaten nothing but “white” foods in the period leading up to its composition.
Satie’s 'Socrate' sets texts by Plato (in French translation) about the life and death of Socrates; the version I made for soprano and string orchestra based on the original voice and piano score keeps to Satie’s notion of ‘whiteness’ with subtle changes to the texture here and there in the strings to support the flow of the music through little contrasts. I realized when listening to my WKO version that I was paying little attention to what the soprano was singing (in French), and was instead starting to think about how well the music would sound with a violin taking the principal line. Thus my idea of a Satie-an anti-concerto was born, with the violin line being modelled on the original vocal line. Octave transpositions and occasional embellishments are applied in order to keep the melody idiomatic, proactive and, importantly, of constant interest to both performer and listener. I also gave a new character to the solo line through the addition of many grace notes.

I entitled this new version of the work 'Socrates ungraved' (2016) – “ungraved” is an old English word for disinterred or “dug up”, relating to my feeling that this creation is a way of giving new life to an old work. I was delighted that my good friend and long-time collaborator Dušica Mladenović agreed to work with me on this ‘anti-concerto’ and she gave the première of the work in January 2018 with the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra and Aleksandar Kojić conducting.

Socrates Ungraved (concerto for violin & strings) by Erik Satie/Ian Wilson

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Ian Wilson (Belfast, 1964) has composed over 200 works in many different genres which have been performed and broadcast on six continents. He is a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s national association of creative artists, and his music is published by G. Ricordi & Co. Ltd and Universal Edition. 
Visit: www.ianwilson.ie

Marianas (contrabass clarinet & ensemble)

Ian Wilson, composer

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