Ian Wilson [b.1964]
Across a clear blue sky [2009]

For string quartet, two portable analogue radios and four drumming toys.

Commissioned by RTÉ to mark the occasion of Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday.

Performed by the Esposito Quartet
St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny, 11th September 2021 (live audio recording)

Across a clear blue sky was inspired by Seamus Heaney’s poem Horace and the Thunder, written after the terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre in 2001. In the past I have set some of Heaney’s work to music for singers but this was the first time I took the opportunity to respond to one of his poems in a purely instrumental way. The freedom that came with this approach brought a sense of adventure to the writing process which I hope is mirrored in the piece itself. Heaney has an ability to always respond to diverse aspects of the human experience with insight and dignity, and I attempted to underpin the dark and aggressive elements in this piece of music with a sanguinity that I hope will acknowledge the poet’s influence on it. I decided to incorporate some extra items into the performance, namely two portable analogue radios for (mainly) white noise and a number of drumming toys for the end of the work (all to be played by the quartet). The purpose of incorporating these items is deliberately ambiguous – some listeners might understand the drumming toys to be an ironic comment on the idea of war; others might take them as simply another sound source. Similarly, the presence of the radios might be taken literally as the idea of someone trying to find news about the event that inspired the piece while others, again, might hear them as a background ‘wash’ out of which the instruments emerge. It is not for me to say how they should be perceived. Ian Wilson

Read Seamus Heaney’s poem here

Return to NSQF Irish Quartet Archive main page

Ian Wilson was born in Belfast in 1964 and began composing while at university. He has since written over 200 works, including operas, concertos, 20 string quartets, a range of orchestral and chamber music and multi-media pieces. His compositions have been performed and broadcast on six continents and presented at festivals including the BBC Proms, Venice Biennale and Frankfurt Bookfair and at venues such as New York's Carnegie Hall, London's Royal Albert and Wigmore Halls, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and Muziekgebouw, Vienna's Musikverein and Tokyo's Suntory Hall. Wilson has in recent years also worked with jazz musicians, Asian tabla and Chinese pipa players and traditional Irish singers; he has also collaborated with choreographers, theatre directors and electroacoustic and computer music composers.

In 1991 Ian's first orchestral work, Running, Thinking, Finding, received the composition prize at the Ultima festival in Oslo and in 1992 he received the Macaulay Fellowship administered by the Arts Council of Ireland. In 1998 he was elected to Aosdána, Ireland's State-funded body of creative artists and in recent years he has been AHRB Research Fellow at the University of Ulster, An Foras Feasa post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Dundalk Institute of Technology and Associate Composer with both the Camerata Pacifica ensemble and the Ulster Orchestra. He was director of the Sligo New Music Festival from 2003 to 2011. Ian received a Major Individual Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2016.

There are commercially-available recordings of nearly fifty of Ian's works on labels including Diatribe, Riverrun, Black Box, Timbre, Guild, Meridian and Chandos. His music is published by G. Ricordi & Co. and Universal Edition Ltd.