The Contemporary Music Centre is devising a new exhibition focussing on composers and their working methods, to open in Cork in May.

Entitled The Art of Sound, this is CMC’s contribution to the festivities for Cork 2005: European Capital of Culture and is made possible by funding from the Cork 2005 committee. It will open in the new Dalton Gallery of the Cork Public Museum on 4 May 2005 and run for one month.

The project arose from the belief that the creativity behind musical composition is a mystery to the non-initiated. Everyone knows that artists use paint and brushes and that sculptors use bronze or wood, but what tools does a composer use? How does he or she communicate what may be a very complicated musical idea in such a way that it can be played by others -- sometimes as many as 100 instrumentalists in an orchestra, for instance?

The Art of Sound aims to bring to life the missing ‘middle bit’ between the musical concept which exists only in the composer’s head, and the realisation of the work as a finished performance.

The exhibition is aimed very much at the lay person, and uses a multi-media approach to illustrate the different ways in which Irish composers have approached music notation in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Illustrations of various forms of notation, traditional and in some cases very non-traditional, will be set alongside striking photos of the composers by Eugene Langan, the exhibition’s designer.

An important feature will be an Audioguide to enable visitors to listen to sound clips of each work on headphones and hear an explanatory voiceover as they move through the room.

The Contemporary Music Centre’s collaborator in the project is the Music Department of University College Cork. In partnership with UCC, a number of live performances and gallery talks will take place during the exhibition’s run.

The show is not intended as a survey of contemporary Irish music and in no way aims to represent all the significant works and composers of the last 100 years. In a project such as this there are many constraints imposed by design, available space and cost and it has only been possible to focus on some 20 examples from the thousands of Irish works in CMC’s collection.

Nevertheless, it is hoped that the exhibition will bring contemporary music to life for non-musicians and especially for school students, and cast some light on an artform that for many is forbiddingly difficult to approach.

Posted: 14 February 2005