Martin Iddon: Hesperides

An album of work by award-winning composer Martin Iddon performed by the Quiet Music Ensemble and tubist Jack Adler-McKean.

Entitled Hesperides, the album showcases a collection of Iddon’s most delicate and captivating compositions and features the work Λαμπάδες (Lampades) for tubist and fixed media, which won the Ivor Novello Award for solo composition in 2021 and performed here by Jack Adler-McKean.

Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland / An Comhairle Ealaíon, the album explores the boundaries of audibility and the emotional depth hidden within the quietest sounds. in’ei and the title track, Hesperides are performed by the Quiet Music Ensemble featuring Seán Mac Erlaine (clarinets), Roddy O’Keeffe (trombone), John Godfrey (founder and artistic director, electric guitar and electronics) Ilse De Ziah (cello), and Dan Bodwell (double bass).

Talking about the works on this album, composer Martin Iddon said: ‘If my music is quiet—and it’s a decade or so since I wrote any dynamic that wasn’t ppp; sometimes, it seems so obvious to me that the music should be like that that I forget to write in the dynamic at all—it’s not because of any sort of programmatic or aesthetic belief in quietude, but rather that more would feel like a sort of excess, would feel like it was quite simply too much. I’m (sometimes painfully) shy. I’m unconvinced of the capability of the language I use to say the things I mean, except obliquely. That sort of uncertainty is part of the reason why I don’t much like to raise my voice, although I also, for what it’s worth, would simply prefer not to. Sometimes people are surprised, given all this, by how loudly I laugh and sing. It’s increasingly difficult for me not to think that all sorts of things that happen (or don’t happen) in my music are a product of the fact that I’m just like that and the music is, at least a little, like me.’

Quiet Music Ensemble
Jack Adler-McKean Tuba

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RECORDING CREDITS