Donnacha Dennehy: New Jersey (for piano) - Digital (Not Printable)

PDF for piano. Commissioned by Min Kwon for her America/Beautiful Project.

3 minutes, 2024

Composer note
It’s hard to tackle the immense topic of America as a whole in a short piece, with its complicated history and its splintered present. Perhaps inspired by the fact that the original hymn for America the Beautiful was composed in New Jersey, I sought a way into this piece by reflecting on my own ever-deepening personal connections with the country as an immigrant who came here for good when I was well and truly in the midst of my adult life. I never — ever — expected to end up in New Jersey one day. It kind of happened by accident. But now it is completely tied up with the childhoods of my children. They are as much New Jerseyan as they are Irish or anything else, and my daughter especially so, as she was born here too. They have an attachment to the place, and already my thinking of them is suffused with the memories of passed and passing New Jersey summers, a kind of feeling of summer that does not really exist in Ireland. Maybe everything I write has this sort of existential bittersweet edge to it, but here it passes quite beautifully for the most part, like a fading Polaroid.

— Donnacha Dennehy