Through the Digital Door: Samhain 2024
The month of Samhain, November, marks the end of the harvest season and the start of Winter in the Celtic calendar.
Traditionally, it is thought that the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead is at its most transparent, when ghosts and magical creatures are free to roam abroad.
Coincidentally, it is also a time when fog and mist becomes more prevalent in Ireland. Although there is meteorological assurance that there is no connection, as you walk alone through fog, with shrouds of mist closing in all around, can you really be so sure?
Photo credit: Brian Cahill
Ceo Tiubh i Samhain, which means ‘Thick Fog in November’, by Finola Merivale for gamelan, saxophones, drumkit, cajon and bass guitar captures that initial sense of trepidation, but then mellows into a more positive perspective.
In her programme note for the work, Finola refers to the consistently strong influence of both Western and Javanese composers of gamelan music on her practice. Freedom and flexibility for each musician is an integral part of the work, and she describes how,
pieces are developed through the rehearsal process: scores are notated on chalkboards or performers handwrite their own notes. Pieces are transient and change between performances.
This extract is taken from a recording made by the Golden Thread Gamelan Ensemble at the work’s premiere on November 8th, 2011 at the Clothworkers' Centenary Concert Hall, University of Leeds.
Passing Ghosts from Ian Wilson’s 2021 release, Orpheus Down weaves an evocative soundscape around the classical myth of Orpheus and his journey into Hades to seek the release of his beloved Eurydice.
This extract is taken from the CD released on Farpoint Recordings and is available to listen here in the CMC Library.
Composed for bass clarinet and double bass, the work, whose ten movements describe Orpheus’s unfolding journey, was premiered by Gareth Davis (bass clarinet) and Dario Calderone (double bass) on April 10th, 2024 in DCU St. Patrick’s Campus, Drumcondra, Dublin.
Irene Buckley explores the more real-and-present horror of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch through her short opera work for Soprano, Ghost Apples. In her programme note for the work, Irene describes,
a scientist studying the 1.26 million square kilometre mass of floating plastic known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch looks for patterns, and some kind of meaning. By looking at the phenomena of ghost apples, and seabird corpses loaded with plastics, she starts to uncover the disastrous and indelible imprint humankind is making on our planet.
The textures conjured in the last work in this edition, Calls from the Fog by Enda Bates bring the potent imagery from Sylvia Plath’s poem, Sheep in Fog, to mind:
The hills step off into whiteness…
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.
This piece for flute and live electronics uses various extended techniques, electronic processing and live sampling to generate a dynamic and varying harmonic accompaniment to the main instrumental part.
Premiered on April 11th, 2010 at the ISSUE Project Room, New York, here it is performed by Anna La Berge (flute).