Musician Karen Dervan, the curator of popular 'genre-blind mini festival' Kaleidoscope, offers her own choice picks for New Music Dublin, which kicks off at Dublin's National Concert Hall tonight.
I follow the Twitter account @WeWantPlates. I thoroughly relish the eye-rolling feeling I get when a picture is posted of a recently discovered restaurant dish that comes served in a 'novel' way.
I’m not talking about jam jars, slates and tiny shopping trolleys now. No, no, no - that’s, like, so, mainstream.
I’m talking about ice-cream in an ashtray, spaghetti in an empty beer can, a boiled egg in a tiny trophy, prawn tempura in a open-toe ladies sandal….that kind of outlandishness. But while I’m clawing to get my eyes back into my sternly shaking head, the liberal in me still voices the thought 'Sure, I suppose they’re just looking for new ways to do things”.
And in every aspect in the world of music, haven’t we been doing that since time immemorial?
The New Music Dublin festival presents an afternoon on Saturday March 4th that serves up musical morsels in a new way. It’s cleverly billed as Tiny Portraits in Tiny Rooms and comes straight from the Michelin starred kitchen of Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s premiere contemporary music group. One of the tiny pieces to be performed even has the word 'soufflé' in the title, which made me very smug indeed about my clever food/music analogy. The Tiny Portraits, of which there are eight in total, are presented in various tiny rooms in the National Concert Hall. Once in the room, you’ll listen to a short contemporary piece played by a solo performer or, in one case, by a duo. In two of the rooms, it’ll just be you and the room….and a speaker. Promenade from room to room as you would an art exhibition. Or a tapas crawl…
Other 'fringe' events (those that don’t take place in the main auditorium) in the New Music Dublin festival include three late-ish night festival clubs. If the Tiny Portraits are like a tapas crawl and the main auditorium performances are the 3-course meal, these free-entry festival clubs are the complementary digestifs and truffles you get when you’ve paid the bill. They are to be enjoyed upstairs in the old engineering library in the National Concert Hall after the main auditorium events, and will last approximately 35 minutes. The afore-mentioned Crash Ensemble will present one of these festival club programmes (on Friday March 3rd) while on Thursday March 2nd the innovative Kirkos Ensemble occupies the space. Kirkos promise a deliciously whacky and imaginative bit of entertainment, with clever simultaneous combinations of works and extended technique performance.
The last festival club, on Saturday March 4th, is presented by Kaleidoscope and features a work by one of music history’s famous re-inventors, John Cage, his Living Room Music. Inspired by this, the Kaleidoscope crew is calling their festival club performance Room: Scene. Cage’s seminal 1940 work allows acres of wonderfully imaginative space for the four performers.
Among the other works to be performed are Irish composer Jonathan Nangle’s Vivid Trace, a work for toy piano (an instrument that Cage championed) and mechanised music box.
New Music Dublin 2017 runs at The National Concert Hall, Dublin, from 2-4 March - view the full NMD programme here.
