Garrett Sholdice on curating Crash Ensemble's Free State 9 Concert

Crash Ensemble presents its 9th annual Free State concert showcasing up and coming Irish composers today (22 March) at the Engineering Library, National Concert Hall. The concert features a programme of works selected by guest curator Garrett Sholdice. He writes about the programme:

Free State 9 is dedicated to the memory of Bob Gilmore – a musicologist, performer, teacher, and friend to many Irish composers, including Donnacha Dennehy, Crash Ensemble’s founding composer. I feel very lucky to have known Bob as a friend and mentor. He was particularly supportive of Ergodos, the music company I have run with composer Benedict Schlepper-Connolly for the last decade. I learnt a great deal from Bob but two things seem particularly germane to Free State 9, a concert celebrating the work of young Irish composers: Through his generosity, kindness and support Bob showed me the power of the “vote of confidence”. And in his shrewd work as a writer and teacher, he showed me that strength of creative personality is ultimately more important that any style, technique, or genre.  

 

Crash Ensemble’s director, Kate Ellis, and I selected the pieces for Free State 9 from over fifty submissions. The pieces we arrived at represent six distinct, highly personal voices: 

 

Paul Flynn’s Still Point is rigorously assertive in its blend of dissonance and groove. Peter Fahy conjures a language of spectres in Labourd. Neil Quigley’s Crutch for cello and playback is immersive in its singularity – a delicate interior world. In Vertical Fields, Emma O’Halloran deftly re-configures a familiar gesture, transforming the abstract into something emotionally charged. Sebastian Adams’ 2014.5 joys in a play of rhythmic shapes and cross-currents. And GrIT by Daniel McDermott is all about a relentlessly focussed interrogation of a small amount of musical material. 

I composed The Root and the Crown across a period of over a year; re-drafting, re-working, proliferating material. I began to feel as if the act of composition was perhaps more in this process than in the finished piece itself, the object. The raw musical materials I was working with felt alive. They felt like things that could grow, change, mutate. I found it hard to fix them in place. The finished piece hopefully achieves a balance between the organismal and the structural. It's been something of a departure for me – or rather, maybe a further few steps into a more adventurous approach to composition. 




The title, of course, refers to parts of the tree. It’s also a quote from a text written by artist Paul Klee in 1924 which attempts a kind of phenomenology of the creative process. It seemed appropriate in both respects. 




The music is some of the most abstract I’ve written – in the sense that, mostly, it is self-reflexive. Its various textures are informed by the particular “colours” of Crash Ensemble, its distinctive personalities – for example, the particular weight of its string section, or the specific darkness of alto flute, bass clarinet and muted trombone in combination. 




I thought about my friend Bob Gilmore often as I wrote the piece. The first draft was finished not long before he passed away, and the final draft completed close to a year later. Certain moments in the piece are there just for him.