Ailanthus (2025)

for violin and cello

 

Ailanthus (Tree of Heaven) was commissioned by violinist Darragh Morgan with funding from the Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, for the Fidelio Trio Winter Festival, and received its premiere in the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin on Saturday 29th November 2025, performed by Darragh Morgan and Tim Gill (cello). The commission asked for a response to the iconic pair of Ailanthus vilmoriniana trees that can be seen from the window of the Visitor Centre Gallery in which the first performance took place.

Although rarer than its more common relative Ailanthus altissima, both species are known in their native China as the Tree of Heaven. The latter is often classified as invasive outside of its native habitat due to its extremely fast growth, aggressive suckering and allelopathic chemical inhibitors that restrict competitors. However, these same qualities also make it tolerant of poor soils and resilient to difficult urban conditions, as immortalised in Betty Smith's poignant 1943 novel ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.'  

In 2015 I created a 10-week programme called Little Woodland Heights to teach primary-aged children about trees through music, and correspondingly, about music through forest ecology. In the third session the children go on a field trip to a native woodland, where each child chooses their own tree and maps it to music - the architecture of the branch structure forming a rhythmic clave, and the phyllotaxic pattern of the leaf providing a melody. Therefore it seemed natural to use the LWH method to map the two Ailanthus trees – affording two rhythmic cells from the distinctive branching of the duo of trees for the violin and cello, and delineating the harmonic material from the pinnately compound leaf pattern.

In addition to the specific material derived from the leaves and branches of the trees, I was also more broadly cognisant of the Ailanthus' unique ability to ‘sucker', where adventitious buds along its extensive root system can suddenly activate, sending up new vertical shoots at considerable distances from the parent tree. Occurring naturally as part of its growth habit or as a response to stress, this reproductive method means that a single Ailanthus tree can quickly create dense stands or thickets across large areas. This rapid proliferation informed my treatment of the melodic material, which returns seasonally in increasing rhythmic density.

Further inspiration for the piece came from the place in which it was composed – Casa Roberto Ivens, the childhood home of Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, whilst I was serving as artist-in-residence at the Casa da Arquitectura in Porto. Although researching Siza's works for another project, it was inevitable that some cross-pollination would occur. In his 2022 treatise ‘Imagining the evident' Siza writes that “the relationship between nature and construction is essential in architecture…harmony between the autonomy of the building and what had existed before needed to be established.” Confronted with Siza's acute awareness of the dialogue between a building and its environment, I was forced to consider the implications for Ailanthus, and so conscious that the piece formed part of a programme that also included solo works from Bach's Cello Suites and Telemann's Violin Fantasias, I decided to situate the piece overtly in that context and make the musical language porous to its concert environment. Both Bach and Telemann's solo suites were evolutionary in their approach to giving the illusion of vertical harmony via horizontal melodic lines, so I took this as a point of departure...and was further reassured of this direction by Siza's words “to begin with the obsession of originality is an unrefined and rudimentary process.”

Thanks are due to violist Garth Knox for his suggestion to explore the relationship between noise and note, to violinists Adrian Hart, Oleg Ponomarev and Aoife Ní Bhriain for their technical advice, and of course to Darragh Morgan and Tim Gill for the invitation to write this work.

 

Dublin, August 2025