Contemporary musicians and composers in residence in Dún Laoghaire

Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council have announced a number of musicians in residence for 2015/16, which provides the selected composers and performers opportunity to work in the recently-built dlr LexIcon building, as well as opportunities for public performance. The selected musicians are Matthew Jacobson, Grainne Mulvey with singer Elizabeth Hilliard, The Eidola Trio, and Sebastian Adams. Jazz drummer Jacobson will be the first to take up residency at the Library building, followed by Grainne Mulvey and Elizabeth Hilliard. During their residency time,  Mulvey will develop a new opera for electronics and voice with singer Hilliard. Some scenes from the opera will be presented towards the end of their residency period. About the new work:

Judith (libretto: Wolfgang Thompson) is based on aspects of Virginia Woolf’s life, that addresses her time spent at Oxford, her schizophrenia which beleaguers her throughout the libretto, (she converses with Milton and Lamb in the text,) her difficulties in being a female resident at Oxford, her harassment by the Beadles, her role as a feminist and her eventual untimely suicide. 

 

The work is in seven scenes. It will eventually be performed by a chamber orchestra with more male and female voices and with the possibility of instrument doubling if required.

The final resident in the period will be composer Sebastian Adams, who will use the time to develop a number of strands of his practice, including multimedia composition and collaboration, performance, and computer-aided composition:

The first is going to be a concert of improvisations with visuals and electronics, taking advantage of the amazing and unusual architecture of the LexIcon library. 

 

The second strand is a viola recital of works written for me. This will include works by Tom Lane and Garrett Sholdice that I've played already and a brand new piece by Daniel Barkley. Jenn Kirby is working on something for me with live electronics also. Finally, I will be working on pieces for the real-time generative notation software I have been building for the last couple of years. For the first time, I will be inviting other composers to write pieces utilising my patches. I'll also be doing a couple of pieces for it myself. We will work at these together in the LexIcon over the course of the four months and at the end Kirkos Ensemble will workshop the pieces. These will then be tweaked further and we will put them all on as a Kirkos concert at a later date.

The selected musicians for the 2015/16 Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Residency were selected by a panel consisting of Deirdre McCrea, Alec O’Leary and Fergus Sheil.