He had been regarded as a pioneer of modernism in his own country, though later adopted a more pared-down, minimalist style and became noted for religious music. In 1992, a recording of his then 15-year-old third symphony, also known under the title of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, was released to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust: it became a worldwide critical and popular success.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miLV0o4AhE4

I play this regularly. Oddly enough, given its theme, it helps my brainwaves settle to a rhythm where I can work – as does the Adagio from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, or Frank Corcoran’s Trauerfelder, and Ommagio, from Michael Holohan’s Fields of Blue and White

Michael Holohan’s piece apart (I don’t know what inspired it) what does this say about music inspired by intense sorrow? Perhaps it means that powerful sorrow in the hands of a supreme artist blasts away the superfluous, leaving us with our spiritually naked selves.

‘MY HEART IS IN THE EAST’, AN EVENING OF SEPHARDIC AND PERSIAN MUSIC PERFORMED BY THE JUDITH MOK HAMSA ENSEMBLE

Performed by Judith Mok soprano and Javid Afsari Rad santour, with Nick Roth sax, Oleg Ponomarev violin, Cora Venus Lunny viola, Francesco Turissi percussion & keyboard, Simon Jermyn guitars

‘My Heart is in the East, but I am in the West’, wrote the great Spanish Jewish poet, Judah Halevi, who lived in the 11th century. In Spain at that time, Jewish and Arabic cultures flourished alongside each other and cross-fertilised each other. The Jews called Spain ‘Sepharad’. When they were expelled from their beloved Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries, they took with them the romances and ballads of medieval Spain, which would come to be known as Sephardic music. As the Spanish Jews settled in North Africa, Turkey, the Balkans and the Holy Land, this music of loss and longing absorbed all the local musical influences, to produce the incredibly rich variety of Sephardic music we have today. For some years now the Dutch soprano Judith Mok, who is herself partly of Sephardic descent, has been exploring this unique musical heritage.

They will be joined by Javid Afsari Rad, one of the world’s leading exponents of Persian music and its special instrument, the Santour. The Santour is a hammered dulcimer which has been played in Persia for thousands of years, and is the ancestor of our Western piano.

It promises to be a unique evening, bringing together widely different styles of music from Jewish and Islamic cultures, in a spirit of harmony and celebration.

The Judith Mok Hamsa Ensemble is grateful to the Norwegian Embassy and Royal Netherlands Embassy for their generous support.

Additional Resource

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nkkgyZ5ZHY

www.youtube under Judith Mok
www.judithmok.com
www.myspace.com/judithmokofficialmyspace

A few of us repaired to the Hugh Lane Gallery Cafeteria/Restuarant afterwards, and as we were leaving, Francis O’Duffy spotted the Gallery piano, and proceeded to amaze us with his arrangements of Irish airs, until, just as he finished, and having drawn an audience, he was reprimanded by one of the porters. I hadn’t heard him play in 20 years, so I was gobsmacked.

I think he is trying to arrange a concert, so if he succeeds, I will of course mention it here, and recommend that you give yourself a treat.

All in all, a wonderful afternoon – and the day was fine too!

The Cat Flap
I’m no objectivist (I think!) but I really enjoyed
Peter Sirr’s review of The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918 – 1975, and while I could take or leave some of the poems quoted, I thought this was marvellous.

Walk about the subway station
in a grove of steel pillars;
how their knobs, the rivet-heads–
unlike those of oaks–
are regularly placed;
how barren the ground is
except here and there on the platform
a flat black fungus
that was chewing-gum.
(Jerusalem the Golden, 18)

Rosemarie Rowley’s essays

ECT in the life and work of Sylvia Plath by Rosemarie Rowley

One of the characters in my novel The Water Star undergoes ECT and in trying to imagine it I could not see how it could be other than barbaric.
Rosemarie Rowley thoughtful and affecting essay convinces me that this is so.

Writing of the ECT as a ritual should not surprise us. It is a ritual, a modern one. The treatment is both profoundly humiliating, and barbaric, twin elements of torture. In a letter to the author of this essay, myself, Ted Hughes described it as an atrocity. He wrote to me that ECT was the crucial event in her writing

The Beckett Country Collection
The Beckett Country Collection is now online at Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Project (IVRLA) at UCD.
The Beckett Country Collection is derived from
The Beckett Country: Catalogue of an exhibition for Samuel Beckett’s eightieth birthday. E. O’Brien and J. Knowlson. Black Cat Press. Dublin 1986... See Eoin O’Brien’s Samuel Beckett page.

Eoin O’Brien
Do further explore Renaissance Man Eoin O’Brien’s website.
Eminent cardiologist, friend and publisher of Samuel Beckett, he is also a considerable medical historian. See, for example, his Conscience and Conflict. A Biography of Sir Dominic Corrigan (1802-1880). The Glendale Press. Dublin 1983, which, as it has long been out of print, he is generously making available for free download under a Creative Commons licence, along with other medical history volumes of great value, such as The Charitable Infirmary, Jervis Street 1718-1987: A Farewell Tribute. Edited by E. O’Brien. The Anniversary Press. Dublin. 1987. pp.279. Illustrated..
Many of his voluminous papers and essays are likewise available. It’s quite a monument to a life’s work, and is still growing.

The Dublin Review of Books

The Dublin Review of Books is proving to be a most stimulating online review, allowing critics to flex their critical muscles in essays up to 7,000 words in length. Such reviews have only been available to tiny audiences in Ireland, and it’s a particular pleasure to see such intellectual stimulus online, for free. The Phantom of Exclusion, by Barra Ó Seaghdha’s review of Surveying Irish Poetry
Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000, by Justin Quinn, Cambridge University Press, 256 pp, £14.99, 978-0521609258, is a fine example of this.

Chris Singleton
Finally, he gets in this post as he writes fine lyrics, but Dublin solo artist Chris Singleton’s Rock and Roll and Hyperbole recently had a very interesting post on how musicians can track how and when their music is being listened to. Here’s an excerpt:

With the rise of social networks like Facebook, Myspace, iLike and Last FM, musicians now have a plethora of ways to measure how many people are listening to their music. For example, any band with a Myspace page will be able to see how many plays of their songs they are getting; which tracks tend to be more popular; and how many songs are downloaded (as opposed to just listened to).

The permalink for the full entry is here.

This is Björk’s video gallery, on which, oddly enough, Wanderlust isn’t available as I write.

Will.i.am and Jesse Dylan — and friends — go for Barack Obama

A pro-Barack Obama “Yes We Can” video making the Internet rounds offers an interesting pairing — Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am and filmmaker Jesse Dylan (son of Bob), plus a raft of celebrities. The inspiration of the video — and its core theme — was Obama’s speech after he lost the New Hampshire primary, which Will.i.am talks about here.

But pop culture folks can treat this as a quiz — who do you recognize?

-Top of the Ticket Blog, The Los Angeles Times

– and don’t miss the blog of the co-creator of the video, Will.i.am, of Black Eyed Peas writing about why he got involved.

Here are the words

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom. Yes we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.
It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountain-top and pointed the way to the Promised Land.
Yes we can to justice and equality. (yes we can) Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can. Si Se Puede.
We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We want change!
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
We want change! I want Change.
The hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in America’s story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea – Yes. We. Can.

UPDATE
***And here’s a link to the most thoughtful video. If you have twenty minutes to spare, this is deeply moving in a different way. Laurence Lessig : 20 minutes or so on why I am 4Barack

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society.
He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge.

UPDATE 2 Here is the text of the Lessig video

The technical problems and solutions will probably find their way into Ubuntu Learner when I get a minute, and as I don’t expect you to be interested in personal problems, that really leaves the domain and the cultural life in Dublin…

First of all the domain. One usually gets an email notice when a domain is about to expire. In the case of Irish Culture Guide, I didn’t and to cut a long story short I managed to acquire www.irishculture.ie, so my I’ve just migrated my Irish Culture Guide site to that domain. I haven’t been able to work on it for a long time, so obviously there are dead links and it needs fleshing out, but it’s still a useful site, I think. For some reason I can’t get Google Search to work on it so I may revert to the old search engine. Anyway, that’s getting technical, a topic which doesn’t belong here.

So to the Cultural Life.
Two friends and I set out to see Bill Doyle’s exhbition at the Gallery of Photography, but we stopped off at the National Photographic Archive, which is also in Temple Bar, and were entranced by In Search of Ireland, 1913. I’m sure I had seen a TV documentary on Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, the two photographers, and Albert Kahn, the philanthropist whose dream was an Archives of the Planet and whose vision made this possible. The exhibition is on till 11 February, so try to see it if you haven’t already. The Photographic Archive is part of the National Library of ireland, by the way.

Then on Wednesday the 9th January I hauled myself through the rain to The Clé Club at Liberty Hall to hear my good friends Whisht!. Whist! (a play on the Irish éist! ie listen) is a group of traditional singers who live in County Wexford. They’ve just brought out a cd, The Cuckoo’s Note (you can here some Mp3 samplers here and are worth noting. I’m not biased, I promise! Apart from the featured Whist! regular contributors came up with some lovely songs from the floor, and I was particularly struck by a beautiful song in Irish by Seosaimhn Ní Bheaglaioch . I can’t remember the name of it, but she told me it dates from the 16th century. Impressive.

I was hoping for an early night on the following night, but a friend brought me off to The Teacher’s Club in Parnell Square to hear the Dublin Yarnspinners (established 1995).
My main reason for going was really to see and support my friends the actors Jack Lynch and Nuala Hayes, who are storytelling stalwarts. I’m delighted to report that Nuala has just been shortlisted as best actress for The Irish Times Theatre Awards for her part as Baby in the Taibhdearc na Gaillimhe production of Scath an Oilc, which is translated by Peadar Ó Cúláin from John McGahern’s The Power of Darkness. As it turned out, both Jack and Nuala told a story, but in the spirit of the event (see Liz’s Irish Journal for a flavour of it), the featured storyteller, a young woman called Claire Murphy, who told a dazzling tale about the indigenous Nova Scotians and Columbus, were joined by others from the floor. I must say I found both the Clé Clubng and the Dublin Yarnspinners evenings very moving, particularly the latter. When Clare Murphy told the story of Diarmaid and Grainne, a story I thought I knew well, the fact that a young person was telling an ancient story and making it new and fresh with all her heart, and the fact that it had orginally been told to her like this by John Moriarty was very moving indeed. For all my love of the web, cinema etc, there is nothing to match a live performance.
In the way that things are linked, Nuala told me that when she was performing in the Taibhdearc she heard about Clare’s STORY NIGHT, a monthly storytelling evening open to all, which she helped set up in Galway. She told me it was like walking into Tír na nÓg – everyone there was young and it was packed. And it’s not just happening in ireland, but all over Europe. There were French and German storytellers in the audience last week. One man said that his father was a storyteller in France, and his aunt was a storyteller in France!

This post is getting rather long, but bear with me a moment till I mention the Irish Premiere of Frank Corcoran’s String Quartet No 3 at the Hugh Lane Gallery last Sunday morning. That was a rather special privilege but best leave it to Frank to describe:

Mine is in one surging , flowing movement, a kind of musical stream-of-consciousness, referring and feinting and discharging all the elements of fast / slow / violent/ lyrical/ dense/ thin / total stringiness of filigrane.

Other gems to look out for are Jerome de Bromhead‘s second symphony, which will be performed by the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colman Pearce in the National Concert Hall on Tuesday 22 January, and Geraldine O’Reilly‘s A Circuitous Line, her latest paintings at The Alternative Entertainments Gallery, the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, until January 21. The Luas will drop you outside the door at the end of the line.

Some real gems of world music in there, just sample tracks, one leading on to another. And you can narrow it down to whatever mood you’re in – calm or energetic, dark or positive. One for the bookmarks.

Musicovery

[via 15 Ridiculously Useful Websites] [via Digg]

Doll’s Face is reminiscent of Björk’s All is Full of Love video, another amazing work, but is nevertheless distinctive and original.

Now, a new generation has emerged and David and Emer’s sons are artists in their own right. One of them, Chris Singleton, is a highly-praised solo recording artist who writes his own material, and is downloadable from iTunes. You can sample – and buy – his album Twisted City, here. If you like his sound and you’re in Dublin, go along and hear him at Crawdaddy’s in Harcourt Street on Wednesday 18th April @20.30. Should be a good night.

SINGLETON MUSIC