Centenary Celebration of Frederick May

Centenary Celebration of Frederick May

The Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin Institute of Technology Conservatory of Music and Drama and RTÉ Performing Groups will host an afternoon of music and presentations on 12 November in celebration of the centenary of the year of birth of Irish composer Frederick May.

The Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin Institute of Technology Conservatory of Music and Drama and RTÉ Performing Groups will host an afternoon of music and presentations on 12 November in celebration of the centenary of the year of birth of Irish composer Frederick May.

The event is entitled Sunlight and Shadows, after May’s most famous work, an orchestral piece premiered in 1956 by the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra. May is considered an important figurehead of Irish composition in the twentieth century, although his relatively small corpus of works reflects a dropping off in productivity following the onset and intensification of tinnitus in the late-1940s, a condition which forced May to give up his musical directorship of the Abbey Theatre and to cut back on compositional activity to a grave extent.

Almost all of May’s important works, with the exception of Sunlight and Shadows, date from the 1930s and early-1940s. This was a period where study with Vaughan Williams in London and with a colleague of Alban Berg’s in Vienna, Egon Wellesz, led to May’s co-founding, alongside Brian Boydell and Aloys Fleischmann, of the hugely important Music Association of Ireland. Following his drop off in compositional activity, May produced arrangements of Irish tunes for Radio Éireann.

The centennial event will take place in the McCann Hall of the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama, and will feature workshop performances of May’s String Quartet (1933) and his Four Romantic Songs (1933) by the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet. An opening address will be given by novelist Colm Tóibín, whilst an overview of Frederick May’s life and work will be given by DIT lecturer Dr Mark Fitzgerald.

Admission is free to the event, which will run from 2.30pm to 5.30pm.

www.cmc.ie

Pictured: Frederick May. Photograph: Woodtown Music Publishing.

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Published on 21 October 2011

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