Music Current Festival | 8 - 11 Nov 2021

MUSIC CURRENT is Back! Dublin’s annual new music festival returns with six concerts in four days, featuring the best in new Irish and international contemporary electronic music. Exciting, unpredictable, multi-media music performances, with video, interactive technologies, surround sound, guns, buckets, movies, singing in the dark, videos, audience writing scores via browsers, and old fashioned music concerts.

MUSIC CURRENT, now in its fifth year, gives a platform for the newest contemporary electronic music. This year’s festival has a decidedly multi-media flavour, featuring: Zubin Kanga performing Alexander Schubert’s piano masterwork WIKI-PIANO.NET, a composition which audience members can alter or extend using their browser; Michael Finnissy’s and Adam de la Cour’s mixed-media meditation on Beethoven, “Hammerklavier” (Part 2); Lina Andonovska performs Brigitta Muntendorf’s “Public Privacy #1 (flute cover)”, a study on the schizophrenic relationship between at-home YouTuber soloists and their very public performances; and two Irish premieres of Nicole Lizée’s film-based studies, “Scorsese Etudes” and “Tarantino Etudes”.

The festival also sees the Irish debut of renowned London-based iconoclasts, Bastard Assignments, who bring their unique brand of collaborative composition and ensemble performance to Dublin in a programme of recent works – a true multi-media performance that can only be experienced live.

MUSIC CURRENT Festival focuses on the most recent music works, but also showcases “classic” works from the repertoire. This year Darragh Morgan, one of the most highly regarded interpreters of contemporary music, gives the Irish concert premiere of Pierre Boulez’s “Anthèmes 2”, a seminal work for solo violin and electronics, in which the computer literally “follows” Darragh’s performance to render a live accompaniment.

Every year MUSIC CURRENT invites composers from around the world to develop new works for the festival. This year we invited seven Irish composers to collaborate with five Irish soloists to prepare a concert of entirely new works based on the their year-long collaboration. The resulting programme is a thought-provoking mix of intimate, imaginative, challenging and playful new works by both next generation composers and established composers.

The festival closes with a double-bill concert of Irish and international works for flute and electronics. Australian flautist, Lina Andonovska gives a programme exclusively of Irish premiers featuring some of the most widely performed international composers of the current generation. Renowned Scottish flautist and new music champion, Richard Craig, closes the festival with a programme of recent works built around Richard Barrett’s “Vale”, mesmeric study for amplified flute.

‘Where we are at musically these days in terms of technology’
Liam Cagney, Musical Criticism

‘One of the finest electroacoustic ensembles on the island at present, The Dublin Sound Lab.’
Bernard Clarke, Nova, Lyric FM

‘Dublin Sound Lab has been… …flying the flag in Ireland over the past decade for European modernism.’
Liam Cagney, Journal of Music

‘Dublin Sound Lab is doing an important job for those in Ireland who remain passionate about music in the post-war avant-garde lineage and who rarely get the opportunity to hear such ‘difficult’ music performed.’
Liam Cagney, Journal of Music