This year’s New Music Dublin festival featured 25 concerts across five days, with events ranging from site-specific works to conventional concerts to free improvisation supported by a collaboration with the Improvised Music Company. In this first review, I discuss the opening concerts.

The festival’s inaugural concert was Ann Cleare’s Nocturne, an Irish premiere performed by Texan percussion trio Line Upon Line at Dunsink Observatory in north County Dublin, a venue not far from the city (attendees could avail of a shuttle bus from the National Concert Hall) but low in noise and light pollution. This was a work concerned with the night sky, taking place across sunset from 7:30pm to a little after 9pm, ending just as stars began to appear.

The work was in four parts in four different areas, indoor and outdoor. Motifs of circles abounded, with the audience encircling the performers for two of the segments. The trio began split into three areas around the observatory. In one space, the percussionist played a series of drums arranged around an outdoor mast. Ribbons connected the drumsticks to a central mast, creating waves in the air, and the drumsticks were handed off to attendees as the segment progressed. Another focused on red light and resonant sounds inside the south observatory, drawing (apparently) on the red dwarf star that will be the last light in our universe. The last segment saw the performers unite outside at instruments arranged in a wide spiral, making their way to the centre.

Some unforeseeable poor luck affected the first part of the performance of this work, as a Garda operation involving a burning car took place across the road, complete with a lot of black smoke and a helicopter.

Like last year’s Terrarium, Cleare’s focus here seems to be creating an immersive experience with a sonic focus – even though the sound was very sparse, and the silence between the sounds was as important as the sounds themselves.

‘Nocturne’ at Dunsink Observatory (Photo: Molly Keane)

Vibrant dialogue
The 6pm concert on Thursday featured another Ann Cleare premiere, a less substantial but far more energetic work for cello and double bass, played by Kate Ellis and Caimin Gilmore. This was a vibrant dialogue between the instruments, heavy on extended techniques, with Ellis’ cello strings stopped with clothes pegs, and Gilmore’s bass with chopsticks. The concert also featured Benedict Schlepper-Connolly’s double-bass solo Blackberry, as well as Lavinia Meijer performing her work Atmospheric Rivers on harp, and Ellis playing the first movement of Ed Bennett’s Strange Waves – three atmospheric solo works that allowed their performers to demonstrate their precise control of tone colour.

The central work for this concert was Gilmore’s BlackGate, with Gilmore, Ellis, and Meijer joined by Cormac Curran on DX7 keyboard. Drawing on the composer’s varied work in various genres – as he describes it, ‘contemporary music to pop, classical, and folk’ – the piece at times had a filmic sheen not unlike the work of American TV composer Bear McCreary, and at others was far more intense. At one point a dissonant drone from the keyboard persisted for several minutes, and though I could see Gilmore playing hard, his sound was lost. I found this piece pulled in too many directions at once, not quite finding a convincing compromise for its extremes.

Caimin Gilmore’s ‘BlackGate’ (Photo: Molly Keane)

The Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble presented a trio of new nature-inspired works in the 3:30pm concert, all using field recordings. This concert demonstrated the breadth of possibilities available even with a relatively restricted concept. Robert Coleman’s These hills used to be forests featured a number of components: natural and imitated birdsong, Coleman’s recorded field notes from his time making the recordings (like brief audio diary entries – a date, a time, a comment on the sonic experience), recorded-on-stage field notes to match from the performers, and a somewhat fanciful ending where the composer invokes a recording from the year 2052. Lara Weaver’s Soft Ground builds from a four-note motif to an almost overwhelming mass of sound, while Pedro Rebelo’s Crana is more abstract and percussive.

Scoring Cocteau
Surprisingly, the only use the main stage of the National Concert Hall saw for the first full day of New Music Dublin was for a film screening, specifically of Jean Cocteau’s surrealist 1932 movie Le sang d’un poète (‘The Blood of a Poet’), with a new score by Erik Friedlander and Matthew Nolan, who performed with Seán Mac Erlaine and Lisa Dowdall. Like the film, the score dealt more with feeling than meaning, with some striking moments – glassy piano as we watch a character enter a mirror, or the contrast as we watch a boy bleeding to death under luminescent chords.

Jean Cocteau’s ‘Le sang d’un poète’ (Photo: Molly Keane) 

Clarinettist Berginald Rash’s concerts at the NCH last year had particularly interesting programming, so I was keen to see what his Bombast! ensemble would bring to Thursday’s concert at 1:30pm. His programme alternated solo works – for bassoon, horn, harp, and viola – with larger ensemble works. Eleven pieces in total were accompanied by visuals designed by photographer Ishmael Claxton, with several motifs but a recurring image of tent cities.

Several of the works had openly political messages, such as Iván Enrique Rodriguez’s highly effective The Broken Contract, named for the concept of the broken social contract explored by the political scientist Danielle Allen, which saw pretty harp lines underscore forceful recorded and remixed dialogue, or Joy Guidry’s Just because I have a dick doesn’t mean I’m a Man – a lightly-underscored recorded monologue on learning how to love and live in her ‘fat, black, queer, non-binary body’, delivered with a humorous kick. Others were less direct appeals to emotion, like Shawn Okpebholo’s clarinet–bassoon–marimba trio There is Always Light, which captures a brightness sometimes hard to look at, or more introspective, melancholic works, such as Quinn Mason’s In Memory for solo horn or Jessie Montgomery’s Peace, for harp and clarinet, with Rash performing the latter part.

The concert concluded with Rash playing the solo part for the world premiere of a concerto by Joseph Hallman. At six movements, this work felt a little too long on first listen, but allowed the whole ensemble to play together and Rash to show off his nimble athleticism on B-flat and E-flat clarinets.

New commissions
The social justice angle of Bombast!’s concert reasserted itself that night through New Music Dublin’s collaboration with the Improvised Music Company, with concerts taking place at the Complex Arts Centre in Smithfield. The first saw two new commissions from the BAN BAM initiative, which highlights female and gender-diverse creators working in improvised music.

Christine Tobin’s Pseudologia Fantastica, performed by Tobin on voice and electronics with cellist Kate Shortt, was direct and uncompromising. Featuring accusatory calls of ‘gaslighting’, ‘Artificial Intelligence’, and other names of tools used by the powerful to control communication, as well as uninterrupted screenings of movie trailers (Network’s famous ending, ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more!’) and former CNN newscaster Jim Acosta’s press conference confrontation with Donald Trump, the work felt like it was preaching to the choir at times. It had some very powerful moments, however, most of all when Tobin read a list of names of women who have died because of the rolling back of abortion care in the US.

Christine Tobin’s ‘Pseudologia Fantastica’ (Photo: Molly Keane)

This was followed by violist Joanna Mattrey’s Battle Ready II, which had a similar message, but a less direct approach. Performing with Larissa O’Grady (violin), Nick Roth (saxophone), and Simon Jermyn (bass guitar), Mattrey’s work featured composed and improvised sections, ending powerfully with the performers behind screens backstage reciting a poem together with so many incredible lines that I found myself futilely trying to transcribe the whole thing. ‘If I could pray I would never cease. / Maybe that’s all that’s left of free speech.’

Córas at the Cooler
After the intensity of these improvised works, both of which went quite long, there was a certain catharsis in the late-night gig by the Córas Trio, who performed from 11:30pm in Improvised Music Company’s beautiful and intimate ‘Cooler’ space in The Complex. The group’s method is to take the traditional tunes they play in sessions and atomise them, then use the atoms to build vast soundscapes. What impressed me most about them was their intuitive grasp of structure; like jazz trumpeter Mathias Eick, they have the capacity to find a starting point and build from it in a way that feels both infinite and inevitable.

The Córas Trio (Photo: Molly Keane)

‘Feeling infinite and inevitable’ could be a mantra for the programming of these opening concerts. Although not everything worked (how could it?), there was a real dedication to exploring the facets and breadth of contemporary music being made on the island. These opening concerts were, if nothing else, a statement of dedication to wide exploration for the whole festival.

For a review of Friday evening at New Music Dublin see here; for a review of the final day, see here.

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