The coming of winter

Gerald Barry’s The coming of winter is a setting of an Irish poem dating from the 9th or 10th century, and was commissioned for the 34th Seminar on Contemporary Choral Music at University College, Cork, in May 1997. The setting is notable for its idiosyncratic use of text: not only are the words of the poem sung both forwards and backwards, but the second half of the piece is given over to percussive nonsense syllables, making this a quirky but highly invigorating image of ‘the coming of winter’.