A unique Tallaght University Hospital (TUH) and Community Arts project supported by the Meath Foundation has resulted in a unique CD. “Same as it ever was?” showcases the music and poetry resulting from a scheme inspired by Reminiscence Therapy that was run in schools in Tallaght and Cashel in conjunction with the hospital

The project explored the potential of sharing musical experiences between students and their grandparents to enhance intergenerational communication, understanding, and knowledge, and project co-leader, composer Ian Wilson, produced a musical composition that reflects the commonality and differences of those musical choices and the themes that arose from them. Late last year the generations involved in the project were brought together in Mount Seskin Community School Tallaght and Cashel Community School Tipperary. The CD contains five songs by Ian Wilson, settings of poems by Helen Pizzey which were a direct response to the outcomes of the project.

Ian Wilson’s ‘Una Santa Oscura’ (’an obscure saint’) is inspired by Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess, mystic and composer. The music is partly ritualistic and meditative in nature, structured to reflect a ‘cloistered’ day. An electronically-generated tape part plays almost continuously, and much of its basis is one of Hildegard’s compositions, ‘Ave Maria, O auctrix vite’, which is heard at the very end of the work. The work is performed by Ioana Petcu-Colan.

The Amstel Saxophone Quartet’s compilation of contemporary European compositions includes Ian Wilson’s So Softly (1992). The directness of communication is clearly represented in the piece, about which the composer wrote ‘Cast in four sections, the rhythm of the outer tones has the rise and fall of breathing. The piece itself is mostly gentle, almost like a lullaby, with a sense of appearing from, and disappearing into nothingness.’