note 

I. Grave ma non troppo lento                                           
II. Adagietto: Mesto, con sordino, è sempre delicato       
III. ‘from a black diary’ — molto esspresivo: lento  
     

‘…I stalked some glorious butterflies – green and black spotted, and a magnificent crimson or scarlet and black barred…but I let him go at once, and he flew away uninjured. I could not bring myself to crush the little palpitating body between my fingers.’

Roger Casement: The Putumayo Journal

Among other things, Sir Roger Casement was an Irish nationalist, humanitarian activist, and poet, who was honoured and knighted in the early 20th Century for exposing human rights abuses in the Congo and Peru. In turn, he was vilified, and tried, for his part in the revolutionary Easter Rising of 1916, as well as for the ‘salacious’ content of private journals (known as the ‘black diaries’) attributed to him at the time of his trial. In August 1916 he was executed for treason against the crown, with appeals for clemency squashed by the journals’ revelation that he was gay.  

Butterfly Songlines is a collection of three pieces after the memory of this striking, complex, and tragic figure of Irish history – three sorrowful songs without words for string quartet akin to entries in a musical diary. They are indebted to the string quartets of Béla Bartók, in particular his ‘night music’ style where evocations of nature at night come through the usage of eerie dissonances, austere stillness, strange instrumental colours, and lonely melodies, as well as the buzzings and flutterings of birds and insects.

A keen lepidopterist, Casement stalked and collected butterflies during his time in South America, and documented these excursions in his diaries alongside accounts of the atrocities he witnessed. These pieces could be understood, perhaps like his excursions, as an attempt to find, or forge, something beautiful alongside the tragic.