Musician and musical curator Fergal Dowling talks about Dublin Sound Lab and their annual electronic contemporary music festival, Music Current 2018.
Who’s afraid of electronic music? That’s the question we posed at the public discussion during the first Music Current Festival in 2016. This forum is a regular part of the festival now. It’s a space where the audience can also speak to musicians and composers, rather than just having a one-way conversation in the other direction. This was a good question for the first Music Current forum because we wanted to create a pubic discussion about contemporary music performance, but especially about how electronic music is received.
It’s widely appreciated how new technologies have caused a dramatic displacement in music production and distribution, but a similar paradigm shift has taken place in music performance, but it’s not always so well recognised.
Dublin Sound Lab is the company that produces the Music Current Festival. The group started out as an ensemble, of sorts, dedicated to performing the very newest music. The organist and harpsichordist Michael Quinn and myself, an electronic composer, founded Dublin Sound Lab. We first met when we were music students at Trinity College, where we performed together in student ensembles, playing new works by fellow students. But it was only much later we met again and started Dublin Sound Lab in 2008 to preform keyboard and electronic music together. Over the years, we invited other composers and performers to become involved in a number of different projects. Dublin Sound Lab is not really an ensemble anymore (if it ever was), it’s a multi-headed beast – we usually describe it now as a 'music project group'. So we like creating projects that ‘normal’ ensembles couldn’t or wouldn’t tackle. For example, last year we commissioned and produced a piece called Perisonic for surround sound and surround video.
We have always been keen to invite internationally recognised composers and performers to work with us and to share their work with us and other Irish musicians. In 2009 we invited the renowned violist Garth Knox to give a lecture and recital; then in 2011 Karlheinz Essl joined us for a two-day workshop and portrait concert, and in 2014 Peter Ablinger visited for a masterclass and portrait concert. There was a lot of interest in these events, so we set up Music Current Festival in 2016 to formalise this type of event with a featured guest composer, portrait concerts and related concerts and masterclasses, all centred on live electronic music. Now, each year we commission one of the participating composers attending the masterclasses to write a new work for the following year’s festival.
We make an open call for participation inviting composer to send works for performance, and to come and attend masterclasses. This year, we had more than 60 applications from composers from all over the world for just six places! This is a central part of the festival for us now. We felt is was important to have a large section of the festival that was accessible to artists, who could, effectively, nominate themselves to contribute to the programme or for the commission.
But the main purpose of the festival is the evening concerts. This year, the guest composer is the celebrated Belgian composer Stefan Prins. He’s visiting Dublin for the first time to present his Piano Hero series of works (an immersive cycle for midi-keyboard, grand piano, live-cameras, video and live electronics) with Stephane Ginsburgh (piano) and Florian Bognor (computer). These pieces are technically brilliant and quite witty. Stefan is probably quite representative of a new generation of composers who are not in awe of technology, but use it confidently to talk about the nature of music and the relationship with the audience.
The theme of this year’s festival is ‘keyboards’, so there are pianos, prepared pianos, toy pianos, and midi keyboards – not to mention live electronics and even computer qwerty keyboards. Yarn|Wire ensemble, a piano and percussion ensemble from USA, are playing three new works specially written for them, including a piece by Irish composer Ann Cleare. Irish audiences probably know Izumi Kimura as an improviser, but on Saturday 14 April she will be performing extracts from John Cage's seminal work for prepared piano, Sonatas and Interludes. Izumi will also premier two new works commissioned by Dublin Sound Lab for prepared piano and live electronics, written specially for Izumi by two rising stars of the Irish new music scene, Elis Czerniak and Francis Heery. So this will be a very unusual programme.
In the final concert on Saturday evening, Xenia Pestova – an astounding pianist – will premiere the six selected works by the participant composers and also perform two new commissions: one by last year’s festival commissionee, the Italian composer, Silvia Rosani, and another commission by myself for piano, score-following computer and surround, as well as a recent work Spanish composer Helga Arias Para.
Dublin Sound Lab’s 2018 Music Current festival runs at Smock Alley Theatre, 12 – 14 April – further info here.
