Wednesday 2 March 2016, 8pm
“A night of Irish music” is an immersive showcase of the vibrant and diverse world of Irish composition to honour the Northern Irish musician and musicologist Bob Gilmore, who died in January 2015. The concert takes places as part of “The world according to Bob”, a two-day event with performances and talks held at London’s City University and Cafe OTO.
Bringing together music by leading Irish composers from across many generations – including Jennifer Walshe, Kevin Volans, Karen Power, Donnacha Dennehy and Linda Buckley among many others – this concert exposes the extraordinary breadth and vitality of contemporary Irish composition.
“A night of Irish music” features performances by a range of outstanding performers from Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada and the UK, including Elisabeth Smalt, Andrew Zolinsky and Mira Benjamin. A unique and striking feature of “A night of Irish music” will also be the appearance of composers as performers, and a large number of the works performed will be world premieres written for the occasion.
Award winning Irish broadcaster and documentary maker Bernard Clarke and Irish publisher and musician Toner Quinn will read short extracts from Bob Gilmore’s writings on Irish music between each work, in this fitting tribute to a seminal figure in Irish music.
Supported by Culture Ireland as part of the Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme.
Bob Gilmore was a musicologist who wrote about contemporary music in western and central Europe and north America. His work fell into the categories of composer biography, music theory and analysis, and the critical historiography of music. His areas of specialism included American experimental music, microtonal and spectral music, and the new music scene in Ireland. He wrote about music of highly diverse kinds, manifesting strongly divergent aesthetic positions; the underlying thread was his fascination with creative individuals with strong, distinct identities. He was the author of Harry Partch: a biography(Yale University Press, 1998), a study of the pioneering American composer, theorist and instrument builder, and Claude Vivier: a Composer's Life(University of Rochester Press, 2014). He was also active as director and keyboard player of Trio Scordatura, an Amsterdam-based ensemble specialising in music exploring alternative tuning systems. He taught at Queens University Belfast, Dartington College of Arts and Brunel University in London. In September 2013 he took up a post as Senior Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium. At the time of his death he was editor of Tempo, the UK-based journal of new music. Bob was diagnosed with cancer in September 2012. He died in Amsterdam at 05:30 in the morning on 2 January 2015.
