The Dublin Literary Music New Trail 2011 consists of a main trail at the literary parade in St Patrick’s Park, location one, as well as an extended trail across South Georgian Dublin, locations two to seven. The five alcoves on the main trail at the literary parade have been carefully chosen due to the connection between the Irish composer and the Irish writer to whom the alcove is dedicated. The six additional locations on the extended trail have been carefully selected due to their literary connections, with each piece of music accompanying each location selected due to the relationship between that Irish composer and Irish writers.
1.A Siobhán Cleary
Composition: The Dole of the King's Daughter
Year: 2005
Time: 7'09"
Performers: Kathleen Tynan (S-solo), RTÉ Vanbrugh String Quartet.
Music Trail Location: Literary Parade
Literary Connection: Oscar Wilde
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This was commissioned by Lyric fm in 2006. It is intended to be the opening song of an opera set in 1880’s London, which features Jack-the-Ripper, Oscar Wilde and the Elephant man among others. This opening song is intended to set the tone of the opera and evoke the dark mood and atmosphere of London's 1880's. The protagonist in the song is a serial killer but she is also pursued and killed so she represents Jack the Ripper as well as one of his female victims. The poem itself, by Oscar Wilde, is a translation of an ancient Breton text. The King’s daughter murders six lovers but the man "who loves her true” kills her, to prevent her from committing any more murders.
This is an early poem by Oscar Wilde written when he was 22 years of age and first appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in June 1876. Wilde’s interest in folklore was inherited from his parents who were important figures in the Celtic Twilight Movement; in particular his Speranza who collected and published folk-tales.
The source of the original Breton text is unknown. It seems to me that The Dole of the King’s Daughter has elements of a Breton lai. Examples of the early lai are lacking but it is believed they contained romance elements as aristocratic love relationship, fantastical adventures, and encounters with supernatural or magical events and beings. The form of the early lais were likely to have been brief, narrative poems accompanied by music; the etymology of the word lai probably derived from the Irish laid (song). The Breton lai was made popular by Marie de France (at the court of Henry II of England sometime between 1160 and 1199, ) who claimed that the lays she 'put into verse' had originally been composed by Bretons 'to perpetuate the memory of adventures they had heard'. Marie's lays contain numerous motifs associated with Celtic fairy lore. These include a fairy mistress, a white stag that speaks, a strange world of light, and magic potions. The Breton lai became associated with Arthurian material, which were transmitted by Welsh harpers and storytellers from Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall to Brittany, where the famous Breton conteurs and harpers performed them throughout the continent.
The King’s Daughter, I believe, was based on the myth of the Korrigan (Rigan meaning Queen). According to Lewis Spence in his Legends and Romances of Brittany 1917, these were "lovely lustful golden-haired women who tried to lure men into their beds - and into a watery death". These creatures are very beautiful when seen at dusk or night, but by day their eyes are red, their hair white, and their skin wrinkled; thus they try to avoid being seen by day. They are sometimes described as important princesses or druidesses who were opposed to Christianity when the Apostles came to convert Brittany. They hate priests, churches, and especially the Virgin Mary. They can predict the future, change shape, and move at lightning speed. Like sirens and mermaids, they sing and comb their long hair, and they haunt fountains and wells.
Text © Siobhán Cleary
Photo © Siobhán Cleary
Photographer: Siobhán Cleary
Visit Siobhán Cleary's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit Oscar Wilde's profile at Irish Writers Online
1.B John Buckley
Composition: The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun
Year: 1993
Time: 4'59"
Performers: Anthony Byrne (pf).
Music Trail Location: Literary Parade
Literary Connection: William Butler Yeats
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The title of this work is taken from The Song of Wandering Aengus by W. B. Yeats:
'And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.'
This piece was commissioned by the 1994 GPA Dublin International Piano Competition with funds provided by the Arts Council. The first performance was given in the National Concert Hall, Dublin in May 1994.
Text © John Buckley
Photo © Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
Photographer: Eugene Langan
Visit John Buckley's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit William Butler Yeats' profile at Irish Writers Online
1.C Roger Doyle
Composition: Frozen in Stereoscope
Year: 2004
Time: 8'50"
Performers: Tape
Music Trail Location: Literary Parade
Literary Connection: James Joyce
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The title Frozen in Stereoscope, is a phrase used in the text of Joyce's Proteus episode in Ulysses.
In this composition, I made use of a new computer music software technique where sounds are captured and frozen - time seems to slow down and 'freeze', like in a freeze-frame in video.
It could be thought of as capturing a moment in time, a time 100 years ago, where the harmonies of different musics from the period would appear to be smeared and abstracted from their original sources, but still retain their charm and poetry, like a faded blurred photograph.
Text © Roger Doyle
Photo © Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
Photographer: Eugene Langan
Visit Roger Doyle's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit James Joyce's profile at Irish Writers Online
1.D Seán Clancy
Composition: Das Lied von Anderen
Year: 2010
Time: 5'56"
Performers: Soprano: Rosie Secker; Bb Clarinet: Jack McNeill; Bass Clarinet: Benjamin Graves; Alto Saxophone: Daniel Milverton; Harp: Rita Schindler; Conductor: Thomas Payne.
Music Trail Location: Literary Parade
Literary Connection: Brendan Behan
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Das Lied von Anderen is a response to files held by MI5 on the celebrated Irish playwright Brendan Behan. Behan first came to the attention of the British authorities for Irish republican activities; however, what is of interest about these files is how MI5’s primary concern shifts from Behan’s republican ties to his involvement with British communism. Contained within these files are numerous press clippings related to performances of Behan’s plays in London, reports on Behan’s civilian activities, what he did, who he met, intercepted letters from Behan to friends and family, and occasionally intercepted phone calls.
This last facet is of particular interest, as it calls to mind activities that were common across the world during the cold war. These actions have only escalated in recent years facilitated by the internet, with not only government agencies accessing our data, but also private corporations.
This piece then, sets an original text based on a phone transcript recorded between Brendan Behan and Barbara Niven on the 26th of August 1957. Just as one never hears from Behan’s principal characters in his dramas, only hearing of them; this piece is a one sided phone conversation where we never get Behan’s perspective, but hear of it.
Text © Seán Clancy
Photo © Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
Photographer: Deen van Meer
Visit Seán Clancy's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit Brendan Behan's profile at Irish Writers Online
1.E Donnacha Dennehy
Composition: Counting
Year: 2000
Time: 12'33"
Performers: Vogler Quartet
Music Trail Location: Literary Parade
Literary Connection: Samuel Beckett
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There are two strong influences on this piece - the almost mathematically claustrophobic world of Beckett’s later plays and the earlier philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Both Wittgenstein and Beckett were huge influences on the development of my thought since my late adolescence. The question that was paramount on my mind when composing this was: when is something on the border of the world (delimiting it) and when is it IN the world? I considered this question playfully - this is not a dull treatise, more a tragicomedy!
The tape is made entirely from recording the voices of Tim Jeshawitz and Natasha Lohan. Even the pitched material is derived from their voices.
Text © Donnacha Dennehy
Photo © Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
Photographer: Eugene Langan
Visit Donnacha Dennehy's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit Samuel Beckett's profile at Irish Writers Online
2. James Wilson
Composition: Undesirables
Year: 1990
Time: 7'17"
Performers: Concorde
Music Trail Location: Grogan's Pub
Literary Connection: Leland Bardwell
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I was greatly attracted by Leland Bardwell's laconic, compassionate poems, and asked her permission to set them for Dorothy Dorow. In the end, I think that the music turns out to be an equal partnership between voice and cello.
Text © James Wilson
Photo © Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
Photographer: Eugene Langan
Visit James Wilson's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit Leland Bardwell's profile at Irish Writers Online
3. Benjamin Dwyer
Composition: Apuntes si titulos III
Year: 2003
Time: 3'28"
Performers: Benjamin Dwyer
Music Trail Location: McDaid's Pub
Literary Connection: MacDara Woods
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Maybe, as a performer and composer, I am biased, but the old adage that all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music seems to me to still offer a convincing argument. And within Walter Pater’s well- known statement lies the seed of difficulty in the negotiation between word and music. In its normal use as a system of communication, language occupies and serves the rational, denotational, syntactic medium required to fulfil its functional role. Its very suitability as a namer, a labeller of objects, its ability to describe accurately our surroundings, feelings, pasts, futures, ideas, places it in a different experiential arena to music. The fact that it is in the words of Steiner ‘handcuffed to the avarice of logic’ deprives it of the fluidity, the purely metaphoric state enjoyed by music. A clarification of this can be shown when we consider music’s capacity to have horizontal and vertical characteristics (melody and harmony), it’s capability to transcend its own structural and mathematical makeup (the ‘beauty’ of the fugue), to present numerous arguments, sometimes simultaneously contradictory, (counterpoint, inversions, bi- or polytonality or polyrhythmic structures). Subject language to any of these processes (was this a Joycian dream?) and you are left with gibberish. In its normal, functional state, language lacks the flexibility, the meta-constituents that music has.
However, there seems little doubt that the changes brought on in language when it is transformed into poetry and heightened prose somehow inject it with metaphor, and therefore greater fluidity. It is probably impossible to analyse the processes that take place in the creation of poetry, nonetheless they do seem to unlock the handcuffs and transform language into a richer, more fluid conduit for suggestion; not a system utilised to offer one distinct meaning, but one that literally trees the imagination to a ‘chorus’ of possibilities and interpretations. Every line of great poetry is a breaking free of the boundaries of rational admissibility. And so when we take Macdara Woods’ lines ‘ …useless gasp of golden breath’ (Gods), we understand not only a description of a fish out of water, but we also intuit a sense of final breath, an awareness of our own ‘gasp’ at a realisation of finality, of wonder. Something of music’s potentialities to uphold simultaneously but mutually denying characteristics are inherent here with the negative, fatalistic ‘useless gasp’ counter-pointed with the redeeming and life-affirming ‘golden breath’. I could go on. Suffice to say that this language is something close to music.
Music and language, despite an impressive and historic intimacy, are strange bedfellows. This stems, I think, from the way human consciousness engages with each medium. Exalted poetry and prose bathe in metaphoric meanings; however, regardless of the wealth of metaphor contained, ultimately, these meta- messages offer themselves up to that part of human cognition that deals with the interpretation of denotational, verbal syntax. On the other hand, the liaison music makes with our consciousness takes place outside the arena of ‘labelling’ cognisance. Music isn’t injected with metaphor, it is metaphor, and in this respect, it resonates deeper within consciousness.
I think this is one reason why a conflict exists whenever word and music conflate. Each seems to want to dominate. Words, set to music, seem obliged to loose their own rhythmic pulse and syllabic clarity (this, of course, is what. singers spend years trying to preserve), while music’s autonomous nature is at risk when forced to ‘accompany’ the text. There is something of the punctuation, the chopped rhythmic pulse, the logical rationale of words which act in direct contravention to the timelessness, the sense of open space and endless nuance of timbre, the meaning’less’ness (or meaning’full’ness!) of music. It might very well be this essential conflict, this frisson of incompatibility which gives the lied, the choral work, the aria their unique place in art authorship.
This leads me to ask if a word or sentence can be reliably or accurately duplicated in music? To what extent does Wagner’s leitmotifs really ‘mean’ what they are intended to? In what significant and meaningful way does Shostakovich’s ‘signature’ DSCH (the notes D, E flat, C and B natural derived from the German transliteration of his name Dimitri SCHostakovich) really represent the man or his life? A scrutiny of the use of, say, the diminished chord, will show that Schubert may use it to highlight a deeply felt sentiment of love, whereas Schumann may use the same chord to sharpen the blade of rage. My point here is that music will always be too metaphoric to ‘mean’ anything in the way we can tell ourselves verbally; music is by nature too beautifully ambiguous to ‘signify’ anything in the way a text does, no matter how much it ‘aspires towards the condition of music’. This conclusion presents, at least for me, important questions in relation to composing where the intention is to set words or respond to text. The questions of conflict between language and music, ruminations of the exactitude of correlation between text and sonority have occupied me greatly.
Text © Benjamin Dwyer
Photo © Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
Photographer: Eugene Langan
Visit Benjamin Dwyer's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit MacDara Woods' profile at Irish Writers Online
4. Michael Alcorn
Composition: The Old Woman of Beare
Year: 1994
Time: 17'03"
Performers: The Smith Quartet
Music Trail Location: Nassau Street
Literary Connection: Brendan Kennelly
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This work is written around a dramatic recitation on tape of Brendan Kennelly's translation of an early text describing the legend of The Old Woman of Beare. Known in Irish as Cailleach Bhearra and locally as the Hag of Beare, she was a warrior-princess who had the gift of eternal youth. She lived through seven generations, each time taking a new husband and founding a new clan. However the coming of Christianity brought about her end. Some versions of the legend have her immediately turned to stone by a local saint; other versions are more subtle. The gift of eternal youth is taken from her and she becomes a helpless old bag, condemned to live in withered poverty until a priest will bless her and allow her to die. The various texts take up her story when she is old and furious at her fate, remembering, remembering I drank my fill of wine with kings, their eyes fixed on my hair.
The music is a modern Sprechgesang with the reciter banished to the tape to declaim her story, sometimes with the clarity of youth and beauty, sometimes with the bitterness of shrunken old age, sometimes all garbled and broken as if from beyond the grave. The ever-present sea is invoked at every turn and if you travel to the end of Beare, you will find her in Kilcatherine above the shore-line looking out over the bay, where the sea has left her, where the foam dries on the deserted land.
This work was commissioned in 1994 by the Kyoto International Music Festival, where it was premiered by The Smith Quartet. Michael Alcorn is from the North and teaches at Queens University, Belfast. This is the first time this work has come home to West Cork, where the Old Woman still resides.
Text © Michael Alcorn
Photo © Christopher Hill Photographic
Photographer: Jill Jennings
Visit Michael Alcorn's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit Brendan Kennelly's profile at Irish Writers Online
5. Seóirse Bodley
Composition: Streetscape (from Earlsfort Suite)
Year: 1999-2000
Time: 4'14"
Performers: Sylvia O’Brien (S-solo) and Seóirse Bodley (pf).
Music Trail Location: Comhdhail Naisiunta na Gaeilge
Literary Connection: Micheal O'Siadhail
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Earlsfort Suite song cycle was commissioned for the Irish Government Department of Arts, the Gaeltacht, Heritage and the Islands as part of the Millennium Frozen Music celebration. The text is by poet Micheal O'Siadhail and it was performed on 20 April 2008, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin. Bodley and O 'Siadhail have worked closely together over the last twenty years. Streetsong is the final song in the cycle Earlsfort Suite.
Text © Seóirse Bodley
Photo © Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
Photographer: Eugene Langan
Visit Seóirse Bodley's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit Micheal O'Siadhail's profile at Irish Writers Online
6. Frank Corcoran
Composition: Buile Suibhne
Year: 1996
Time: 18'04"
Performers: Das Neue Werk NDR Ensemble, conductor Dieter Cichewiecz, Frank Corcoran (speaker).
Music Trail Location: National Library
Literary Connection: Seamus Heaney
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Though the earliest surviving version of Buile Suibhne (Mad Sweeney) dates from 1671, the Middle Irish text dates from around 1200 and its hero from the early seventh century. Sweeney - a minor king from Northern Ireland - relates in prose and poetic passages his life and suffering. He went mad at the Battle of Máigh Rath in 637AD, cursed by the cleric Ronan, and spent the rest of his life as a fugitive - a kind of bird-man, living in trees, fleeing to the loneliest parts of Ireland and Britain. Sweeney is both hunted and the hunter, ex-king and part-criminal, artist and outcast, pagan and Christian.
My music pierces this spoken text, plays through it, lacerates, aerates, destroys, reinforces, mocks and celebrates the beauty of Sweeney’s words. The plangent oboe, hunting horn, flute as symbol of man’s flying soul, cloying and crying clarinet are all used virtuosically. A huge battery of percussion punctuates these sounds.
Text © Frank Corcoran
Photo © Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
Photographer: Eugene Langan
Visit Frank Corcoran's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit Seamus Heaney's profile at Irish Writers Online
7. Roger Doyle
Composition: Under the Green Time
Year: 1995
Time: 6'28"
Performers: Tape
Music Trail Location: Merrion Square Park
Literary Connection: Sebastian Barry
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'An image of Ireland without the sweet Celtic wrapping'. Under the Green Time is taken from the poem The Room of Rhetoric, by Irish writer Sebastian Barry. The work was commissioned by the Santa Monica Museum of Art, California, with funding provided by the Irish Arts Council, for Distant Relations, a travelling exhibition of Mexican, Chicano and Irish Art.
Text © Roger Doyle
Photo © Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
Photographer: Eugene Langan
Visit Roger Doyle's profile at www.cmc.ie | Visit Sebastian Barry's profile at Irish Writers Online