Amanda Feery [b.1984]
Three Sisters [2014]

Performed by the Banbha Quartet
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 28th March 2021

Three Sisters is a set of inelegant, drunk and disorderly dance tunes. They lie somewhere between the regular, motoric Irish jig beat branded onto the soles of my feet through Irish dancing lessons, and what I actually set out to respond to; a Norwegian hardanger fiddle set of springar dance tunes called the Systerslått, (which pertain to a myth about three pagan sisters who were turned to stone by an angry minister because of the noise of their cavorting out in the fields).

The rhythm of the springar dances are uneven, with some beats unequal in length to others, so I set out to solve the Springar rhythm riddle. In the end however, I just composed rhythms I perceived the Springar dances to embody, and embraced the confusion along the way. I was very interested in the melodies of the dances, and the hardanger fiddle tuning. The melodies of the springar tunes come from somewhere vocal. They seem like they were once sung and singable, but they traverse into a realm of unsingability through both the rhythm of the dance, with its sometimes obsessive repetitions and the emergent harmonies from the tuning of the fiddle. I wanted to latch onto these ephemeral melodic and harmonic moments, like scrolling through a waveform and time-stretching a microsecond.

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Amanda Feery is a composer working with acoustic, electronic, and improvised music, having written for chamber and vocal ensembles, film, theatre, installation, and multimedia.

Amanda holds degrees in Music (B.A.) and Music and Media Technologies (M.Phil) from Trinity College Dublin. Amanda was the Mark Nelson Fellow in Music at Princeton University, completing her PhD in Music Composition in 2019. Her research focused on Kate Bush’s song suite, The Ninth Wave. Whilst in the U.S., she formed collaborative relationships with many ensembles and musicians including Alarm Will Sound, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Mise-en, Bearthoven, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and cellist Amanda Gookin. Closer to home, past collaborators include Crash Ensemble, ConTempo Quartet, the National Symphony Orchestra, This is How We Fly, Chamber Choir Ireland, Dublin Guitar Quartet, Paul Roe, Michelle O’Rourke, and Lina Andonovska.

Her work has been featured at New Music Dublin, First Fortnight Festival, and Dublin Fringe Festival, among others, and she has been composer-in-residence at Bang on a Can Summer Festival, SOUNDscape, and Greywood Arts. Her 2019 residency at Centre Culturel Irlandais focused on recording piano improvisations on public pianos in Paris.

Recent projects include: A Thing I Cannot Name, a 20-minute opera film commissioned by Irish National Opera with a libretto by Megan Nolan; My Year of Rest and Relaxation, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra; and we could be diving for pearls, commissioned by Gleo Festival. Future projects include a work for solo cello, and a work for ensemble and Virtual Singer software.

Amanda was a 2023 recipient of the Markievicz Award, which is funding the composition of an hour-long radio work, with a libretto by Eimear Walshe, in response to Eamon de Valera’s 1943 radio address, ‘On Language and the Irish Nation’.

Amanda is currently a Lecturer in Composition at the University of Galway.