Artistic Work

About
This is the child’s secret treasure chest. A box of wonder. Fragile. Precious. This suite of 12 Preludes for 12 Pianists for solo piano is an intensely personal set of pieces inspired by and dedicated to childhood. The ideas that were used for each of these pieces had been kept safe for a very long time. I only let them see the light of day in 2024 and 2025 when I composed this heartfelt set of preludes. Composed for the following 12 Pianists, half from Ireland and half other countries: Nathalia Milstein (FRANCE), Finghin Collins (IRELAND), Hugh Tinney (IRELAND), Izumi Kimura (IRELAND / JAPAN), Eliza McCarthy (USA / UK), Cormac McCarthy (IRELAND), Ryan Molloy (IRELAND), Isabelle O’Connell (IRELAND / USA), Máire Carroll (IRELAND), Fiachra Garvey (IRELAND), James McVinnie (UK) & Vicky Chow (USA). Throughout the collection we explore wonder, innocence, freedom, serenity, love, discovery, beauty, delight, perfection, the feeling of genuine aliveness, ecstasy, and the end of innocence.

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About
This setting of striking texts from ‘The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible’ by Charles Eisenstein is a culmination of two years of work. My intention was to create a numinous score, structured with both risk and integrity, aiming to distill the essence of this remarkable book. In a time of social and ecological crisis, what can we as individuals do to make the world a better place? This inspirational and thought-provoking book serves as an empowering antidote to the cynicism, frustration, paralysis, and overwhelm so many of us are feeling, replacing it with a grounding reminder of what’s true: we are all connected, and our small, personal choices bear unsuspected transformational power. By fully embracing and practicing this principle of interconnectedness—interbeing—we become more effective agents of change and have a stronger positive influence on the world. Above all, Eisenstein invites us to embrace a different understanding of cause and effect, sounding a clarion call to surrender our old worldview of separation, so that we can create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

About
In its artistic intention, "Washing Away The Sorrow" seeks to create a place for the listener to be cleansed of what needs to be cleansed. Will Duerden emerges, each time anew, from the purifying washes of sound which gently cascade over us from afar, confirming the unsurpassed beauty and power of music.

About The Work
“The Copy and The Original” is a work which explores the different colours of the Baroque Violin and the Modern Violin. In the piece we hear the two instruments blend together in a number of different ways, at times blurring the line between the colours of the two instruments and their different tunings. Continuously-emerging patterns, which echo between the two performers, flow out of the two violins. Dalcroze-inspired physical movements allow us to visually be aware of what is happening in the music. Dedicated to Dalcroze specialist Diane Daly, and Claire Duff. Note: Baroque Violin (415 Hz) and Modern Violin (440 Hz). Since its première, tre work was also performed at Muzik Biennale Zagreb 2025. Having been asked by numerous musicians to do different versions of the work, there is now a version of the piece for Violin & Cello, and also a version for Viola & Cello.

About
The delicately resonant world of the work conveys the humbling feeling of finding the long-forgotten music box of childhood. Dedicated warmly to the memory of George Dunne, my first music teacher, an authentic elder with an unbroken inner-child. Jointly commissioned by the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and the Cork County Council Arts Office to mark the 25th anniversary of the purchase of the Cork County Council Harpsichord. Cork County Council and West Cork Music acknowledge the support of the Arts Council of Ireland. Composed especially for Dohyo Sol & Marcus Mohlin from Camerata Øresund, Denmark.

PROGRAMME NOTE BY MICHAEL PARLOFF
(Artistic Director: Parlance Chamber Concerts, NJ, USA)
Sam Perkin’s 2016 piano trio was commissioned by the Gwyl Gregynog Festival for Fidelio Trio, the oldest classical music festival in Wales. “Freakshow” was composed in honor of the centenary of the Easter Rising, the 1916 armed Irish insurrection against British rule. The rebellion was soon quashed, sixteen rebels were executed, and 1800 prisoners were transported to the Welsh internment camp at Fron-Goch where they were detained from June to December, 1916. Perkin’s “Freakshow” was inspired by stories of the dismal conditions in the prison camp. According to one account, the entire camp was so overrun with rats that one prisoner went to great lengths to catch and feature them in a "Rat Circus” that he presented for the entertainment of his fellow inmates. The macabre tone of this story prompted Sam Perkin to write a set of musically diverse miniatures that draw on themes of captivity and spectacle as points of departure. “Freakshow” is a set of imaginative musical portraits of historical figures whose physical deformities were exhibited as carnival and circus sideshow spectacles during mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Each movement represents a different performer:

1. THE RAT CIRCUS
The Rat Circus provides a brief sonic image of the viciously squeaking and skittering rats in the prisoner’s circus at Fron-Goch Internment Camp.

2. THE TWO-HEADED NIGHTINGALE
The Two-Headed Nightingale is a delicately grotesque waltz evoking a stage performance by the conjoined African American twins, Millie and Christine McCoy, who traveled the world during the mid-19th century as popular song and dance entertainers. Over the course of their lives, they overcame years of slavery, forced medical observation, and degrading participation in fairs and freak shows.

3. THE LIVING SKELETON
The Living Skeleton is a feather-weight musical depiction of Issac W. Sprague whom PT Barnum showcased in the 1860s as “The Original Thin Man” At age 44, Sprague was 5 feet and 6 inches tall but weighed only 43 pounds.

4. THE GENTLE GIANT
The Gentle Giant is a gently ironic, pizzicato portrait of the massive Robert Wadlow, who grew to be the tallest person in recorded history. At the time of his death in 1940, Wadlow had grown to the height of 8 feet, 11.1 inches.

5. THE ANGEL OF DEATH
The Angel of Death is a hauntingly chorale-like sketch of the malicious Josef Mengele, the fearsome Nazi doctor who performed genetic experiments on captives at Auschwitz. Among his subjects were the seven members of the Ovitz Family, an imprisoned family of Jewish Hungarian dwarves who made their living as entertainers. Menegle kept them alive as subjects for his pseudoscientific experiments on heredity.

6. PANDORA'S BASKET
Pandora’s Basket was inspired by a famous early 20th-century contortionist named Li Yeng. The armless and legless Chinese performer became known as the “Basket Lady of Weijing Province”, since she was small enough to sit in a basket only several inches deep.  With its evocative hints of chinoiserie, the movement is the most emotionally far-ranging in the set, vacillating between diaphanous, filigreed textures and more forceful displays of Ravel-like virtuosity.

7. THE ARMLESS FIDDLER
The upbeat final movement, The Armless Fiddler, is a toe-tapping celebration of Carl Herman Unthan, an armless, Prussian-born violinist and actor who learned to play the violin with his feet by strapping the instrument to a stool. He became such an accomplished performer that he appeared as a soloist with many European orchestras and lectured to injured German World War I veterans about how to retrain their legs and feet to take over for their missing upper limbs. In the Armless Fiddler, Sam Perkin creates a jauntily pizzicato Irish jig to summon Unthan’s indomitable spirit.

About
When I was composing a work entitled Pause for the Ortús Chamber Music Festival in 2016, almost 10 years ago, I had done a number of experiments with Irish folksong from a contemporary perspective. My aim was to authentically offer an original point of view from which to view these masterful songs, or at least to show how I would dream of arranging them. For Pause in 2016, I decided on arranging The Foggy Dew, though I had carried out a number of irresistible compositional experiments with She Moved Through The Fair. In 2024, I finally had to revisit these sketches, as they were just asking to be written and I would not have forgiven myself for not allowing the structure to flower into the piece that it is, My Young Love Was Gone (2024). The compositional idea was like a magnet pulling me towards it. My ear guided me towards arranging this timeless melody in such a way as to express the heart of the text while not getting in the way, only saying just enough throughout (a delicate tight-rope walk with the String Quartet), allowing the soul of this overwhelmingly beautiful song to breathe a new breath.

About The Piece
A hypnotic, nocturnal journey through the streets leads us to secrets that we find only if we are open to them.

As a composer and skateboarder, it took me many years to unearth a way to authenticlally blend the two together. Grey Area is the fruit of a collaboration between friends, an exploration of the crossroads linking contemporary music and the essence of street skateboarding, through exploration, discovery and a random nocturnal wandering of the streets.

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