Irish Trad Music Blog

Cover of James Joyce Composer Benjamin Dwyer writes about the Contemporary Music Centre’s project, Musical Tales, a series of four concerts of live music with short films which he curated in Dublin City Libraries in association with the Royal Irish Academy of Music. The concerts took place between 16–19 April 2012 in Dublin City Libraries. Following the success of the Contemporary Music Centre’s first Musical Tales project last year that surveyed the connection between Irish composers and Irish writers, I was delighted to be called upon again to curate and present a second phase based on the connection between Irish composers and perhaps Ireland’s greatest writer, James Joyce. This idea tied in with the selection of Joyce’s Dubliners as Dublin City Council’s Dublin: One City One Book, itself a project that emerged from the selection of Dublin as UNESCO’s City of Literature.

Musical Compositions (Photo credit: Julia Folsom ) The Irish Composition Summer School returns in 2012 for it’s annual week-long course in contemporary composition, taking place from July 4th to 13th at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama in Rathmines, Dublin. This year’s Summer School will be directed by Irish composers Martin O’Leary, also a lecturer at NUI Maynooth, and Kevin O’Connell, who lectures at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. The week’s tuition in the major aspects of composition – harmony, rhythm, structure, technology and instrumental writing – is divided into two discrete courses: the intermediate level, aimed at undergraduate composition students or musicians with similar compositional experience, and the advanced level, aimed at graduate or post-graduate composition students. The course will involve both group seminars and one-on-one tuition, and will focus on writing a work for an ensemble of clarinet, accordion and percussion, to be workshopped and recorded by...