Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Kaleidoscope: Music and Poetry Night, Dec 5th 2012

Here's some info on a very interesting sounding collaborative event featuring Dedalus poet Paul Perry.

Kaleidoscope : A night of Music and Poetry
Featuring: Maya Homburger on violin, Barry Guy on double bass, Siobhan Armstrong on Harp, Benjamin Dwyer on Guitar, and Lucas Niggli on percussion, with poetry by Paul Perry

Curated by Maya Homburger and Barry Guy
The Odessa Cluib, 13 Dame Court, Dublin 2. Wednesday December 5th, 2012. Doors @ 8.30pm, Music @ 9pm. Tickets available from the Odessa Club on 016703080 - priced €10 (including €2 booking fee).

Kaleidoscope night, described by the Irish Times “one of those life-saving, spirit-lifting, pioneering Cultural Ventures we keep hearing about” brings a vibrant, dynamic musical experience to audiences and performers. Innovative and imaginative programming offers a diverse range of music from ancient to contemporary and experimental in a relaxed, intimate and beautiful setting.

Maya Homburger
Born and educated in Zurich, Switzerland, Maya Homburger moved to England in 1986 to join John Eliot Gardiner’s English Baroque Soloists, Trevor Pinnock’s The English Concert and other period instrument groups. Concerts and Recordings as leader of the Chandos Baroque Players and founding her own Trio Virtuoso led her to specialise more and more in chamber music and solo performance. In 1993 she recorded the twelve fantasies for solo violin by G.Ph.Telemann and in 1995 the six sonatas for violin and harpsichord by J.S. Bach together with Malcolm Proud.
Ever since meeting the composer and solo bassist Barry Guy - on the occasion of an extended concert tour with Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music in 1988 - she has devoted her time developing her own personal style on the baroque violin as well as managing the Barry Guy New Orchestra, the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and running her own CD label MAYA recordings.
The idea to perform baroque solo works in the context of free improvised music and newly commissioned pieces sparked off the Homburger/Guy Duo and together Maya Homburger and Barry Guy have given concerts in many major Jazz, New Music and Baroque Music Festivals all over Europe.

New works in her repertoire include Barry Guy’s compositions Celebration, Inachis, Aglais and Lysandra for solo violin, Ceremony for violin and tape, Bubblets for violin and harpsichord and compositions for baroque violin and double bass, especially commissioned for the Homburger/Guy Duo from Buxton Orr, Roger Marsh and Giles Swayne.
After living in Ireland for nine years where they contributed both to the early as well as the contemporary music scene, they have moved to Switzerland in 2006.
In 1999 Maya Homburger organised her own music Series in Dublin called “Now and Then”. In 2000 she was one of the leaders and soloists for J.E. Gardiner’s Bach pilgrimage which took her to many of Europe’s most beautiful cathedrals and churches where she performed in 52 Bach Cantatas.
Recordings include the Duo CDs “Ceremony” (ECM) and “Dakryon” (Maya Recordings), Bach/Guy solo works (Maya Recs.) and “Folio” (ECM) where she appears as violin soloist together with the Munich Chamber Orchestra.

Barry Guy is an innovative bass player and composer whose creative diversity in the fields of jazz improvisation, chamber and orchestral performance and solo recitals is the outcome both of an unusually varied training and a zest for experimentation, underpinned by a dedication to the double bass and the ideal of musical communication. He is founder and Artistic Director of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and the BGNO (Barry Guy New Orchestra) for which he has written several extended works. His concert works for chamber orchestras, chamber groups and soloists have been widely performed and his skilful and inventive writing has resulted in an exceptional series of compositions. Barry Guy continues to give solo recitals throughout Europe as well as continuing associations with colleagues involved in improvised, baroque and contemporary music. His current regular ensembles are the Homburger/Guy duo, the Parker/Guy duo, piano trios with Marilyn Crispell and Paul Lytton, Jaques Demierre and Lucas Niggli and a recently formed trio with Agusti Fernandez and Ramon Lopez. He continues the longstanding trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lytton as well as projects with Mats Gustafsson.



***

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Tom Mathews to read at Ó Bhéal, Cork

Poet and artoonist Tom Mathews will read at the monthly Ó Bhéal poetry evening in Cork on November 26th, 2012.

Tom Mathews was born in Dublin in 1952. After working in advertising he studied Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He has been a freelance cartoonist, writer and critic since 1975. His work appears regularly in The Irish Times and Sunday Independent newspapers. He has had thirty one-man shows and his paintings have been exhibited in Living Art, the National Portrait Show and at the RHA. He has illustrated a dozen books, written a novel and published three volumes of cartoons. His last prose book, The New Adventures of Keats and Chapman, was published in 2008 while his debut collection of poems, The Owl and the Pussycast and Other Poems, was published by Dedalus in 2009. The poet's hobbies, he says, are "drinking stout and talking too much about James Joyce and Groucho Marx".


One Night I

One night I ended up in a flat in Rathmines 
With a girl who told me she used to go out 
With Paul Hewson. I sat on the bed and read 
Her Beckett’s verse: 

It’s rather fun, though not such fun as sex, 
Reciting Echo’s Bones to Bono’s ex. 


News from the Old Country

1
When every line was a crossed line
Every piece was a show piece
Every cross was a Shawcross
And every McNiece was an Apple McNiece


Every edition was a first edition 

Every age was a coming of age 
Every act was an act of contrition 
Every cage was a gilded cage.

2
Every cage was a gilded cage 

Every Shaw was a kickshaw 
Everyman was a Zimmerman 
 every Ricks his rickshaw

Every bear was a Pooh Bear 

Every bah was a big poobah 
Every frock was a Prufrock 
And every pére was Ubu Pére.

3
When every pére was Ubu Pére 

Lou and Andy sang Andalucia 
Every Dylan was a Thomas Mann 
And every Fonze a fons bandusiae

When every whore was a write hoor 

Every Lane was a Dialstone
Every heure was a Flann heure
And every Myles was a milestone.


4
When every Myles was a milestone 

Every hack drove the barman barmy
Every soldier was a dead soldier 
Every army was a standing army.

Every cough was a coffin nail
Every drink was a deoch an doras 

Every feed was a feed of ale
Every chorus was a croaking chorus.


5
Every chorus was a croaking chorus 

Every bede had his bidet
Every see was a Sargasso Sea
And every deed had its D-day.


Every D-day was an LSD day 

Every sou was an aperçu
Every dime was a paradigm 

And every quid a ‘Quid Rides?’

6
When every quid is a ‘Quid Rides?

Every line is a line in the sand 
Every but is a buttress
And every and is an ampersand.


Every rhyme is a half rhyme
Every verse is too clever by half
When fool’s gold maketh the golden calf 

Every line is a crossed line.

Mary Noonan reads at Over the Edge, Galway


Fiona Scoble, Dave Donovan & Dedalus poet Mary Noonan read at Galway City Library this coming Thursday, Nov 15th 2012, at 6.30 pm, as part of the ongoing Over The Edge readings. There will also be readings by students on the MA course in Writing Class 2011/12 from their forthcoming anthology, Abandoned Darlings.

Mary Noonan's debut collection of poems The Fado House was published earlier this year introduces a poet of real achievement and great promise. Her poems may be characterised by an intense musicality and a determinedly outward look, the range of the work (poems inspired by music, by visual art, by myth, by time abroad, and by the magic of family, friendships and love) always matched by the telling details of credible experience.

Her poem, Carry, from the collection, is currently Poem of the Month on the Dedalus website.



Carry

To clear my head of talk, I walked the beach
and found a pebble, a cuckoo’s egg,
held it and saw it was a map.

An oval stone striated with slate-grey markings,
one side bears tracings that arch and criss-cross:
polka of narrow roads,

sandpipers darting in bleached grasses,
contours of a shoreline, the lines on my palm.
A gate opening into a small field.

The curve of the stone offers concentric swirls:
a talisman to ward off the evil eye,
or the nipple of a breast.

Here it is, an amulet, runes and traces
to light and guard you, a cuckoo’s egg
in the wrong nest, a gate opening

into a small field, a circle ploughed
round a lone hawthorn tree, a map
of the way between us. I carry it.