Following a call in spring for applications for the Arts Council’s Making Great Work scheme, which had a total budget of €800,000, seven winning projects have been announced, including two focused on music.

Crash Ensemble, with a project called 20x20, has been awarded funding to commission twenty new works to be performed in 2017. Kate Ellis, Artistic Director of Crash Ensemble, commented:

20x20 is a celebration of Crash Ensemble’s twentieth birthday year. We have commissioned twenty composers to write short works. These new pieces of music will be premiered in ten culturally and historically relevant sites throughout the country. The video documentation and the poetry will be put together in an educational package, but also to create a legacy for the work.

Bassoonist Peter Whelan has been awarded funding for a project called Rediscovering 18th-century Irish State Music from Dublin Castle: Ireland’s first Art Music. The project consists of a concert at Dublin Castle in August 2017 featuring the premiere of two newly-discovered 18th-century odes written for the ‘Irish State Musick’. According to Whelan,

This project is all about classical music in Ireland, and showing that we have a really rich heritage in classical music. The project will involve a concert in Dublin Castle in St Patrick’s Hall, which the music was originally written for, and it will be followed by some sound recordings and video recordings to be put online.

The other successful projects are the Wide Eyes Early Years Festival presented by Baboró International Arts Festival for Children in Galway in Spring 2018; Where We Live presented by THISISPOPBABY and performed during the Dublin Theatre Festival 2017: The Tree Line Project, curated by Oonagh Young and Mary Cremin; LATITUDE by Marie Barrett, a site-specific, visual arts project; and The Visible by Gerard Byrne and Sven Anderson, a networked, multi-monitor, video installation of commissioned video studies by a selection of artists. 

For full details on the winners view the video below, or visit http://goo.gl/awLozu