Library Ireland Week 2021: featured works from CMC's Archive - Dave Flynn's 'Winter Variations'
In today’s feature for Library Ireland Week 2021, in keeping with the theme of Our Future Story: Recharge, Reconnect & Re-emerge, the featured work from the CMC Archive is Dave Flynn's Winter Variations.
Library Ireland Week is an annual initiative of the Library Association of Ireland. Each year Library Ireland Week (LIW) invites libraries across Ireland to host events, campaigns, activities or exhibitions to celebrate the annual theme.
Dave Flynn is a virtuoso guitarist whose music has been performed in prestigious venues including MoMa (New York), Moscow Cathedral and Ireland's National Concert Hall. He also regularly collaborates with some of the most renowned traditional Irish musicians, these have included Liz Carroll, Paddy Glackin, Tommy Peoples, Mick O'Brien & Máirtín O'Connor.
Dave recently launched his new album, Irish Minimalism
Watch the album launch on Youtube:
Winter Variations is an album of new music for electric guitar that evokes winter soundscapes. Dave Flynn’s inspiration for the album correlates with this year’s theme as it emerged from thoughts of new beginnings and seeking creativity in different places.
The Journal of Music reviewed the album, saying:
Whilst the electric guitar sounds Flynn uses on ‘Winter Variations’ are common in rock music, ‘Winter Variations’ cannot be called rock music. It is a record in which the lilting rhythms and ornaments of the traditional music of Flynn’s native Ireland can be subtly heard, however ‘Winter Variations’ cannot be called folk music. Nothing was prepared by Flynn in advance of recording ‘Winter Variations’, it is all freely improvised, yet ‘Winter Variations’ cannot be called ‘Free Improvisation’.
In the liner notes for Winter Variations Dave Flynn writes:
The concept for this album came out of the blue, the blue of the night. One night, soon after returning from a trip to New York, I was listening, as I often do, to the RTÉ Lyric FM show The Blue of the Night, presented by Carl Corcoran. Carl often plays tracks from my previous solo guitar album ‘Contemporary Traditional Irish Guitar.’ That night I thought it was high time I recorded a new album. But what to do? I had to find inspiration for something new.
Flynn continues;
A highlight of my New York trip was a visit to the Guggenheim Museum and its main exhibition – Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow. This exhibition focused on the work of the Zero Art Movement, which was founded by Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and others in the 1950’s. Reacting against the dominant expressionism of the time, they sought to break free by, according to Piene, finding “pure possibilities for a new beginning as at the countdown when rockets take off – zero is the incommensurable zone in which the old state turns into the new.
Winter Variations is available to purchase and listen to on Dave Flynn's Bandcamp page.
<p>Claire Warburton, MA Music Student at NUI Maynooth</p>