The Project Partners are Mel Mercier, musician and composer and Head of UCC’s School of Music; Lewis Glucksman Gallery, UCC and Cork Film Centre.
In 2010, Ireland celebrates the centenary of the birth of Aloys Fleischmann. This summer, as part of those celebrations, the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, UCC, will present an ambitious new work From the Sources, created by musician, composer, and UCC lecturer, Mel Mercier. Based on Fleischmann’s Sources of Irish Traditional Music, From the Sources will feature filmed performances by 100 traditional musicians of the first 986 dance tunes and songs contained in Fleischmann’s monumental work. Some 20 hours of footage, capturing almost 1000 performances, on all the traditional instruments, will be edited for six simultaneous projections in the Glucksman’s upper gallery to create a John Cage-like commingling of traditional sounds and images. In addition to the sound art environment created by Mel Mercier for the gallery spaces, an archive of all the recorded performances will be available for public consultation during the exhibition run.
Taking the publication of The Compositions of Carolan in 1742 as a watershed in the history of Irish music, From the Sources will re-animate the pre-modern Irish musical soundscape encoded in the more than 100 music manuscripts published up to that time. Beginning with the first tune in Fleischmann’s collection, ‘The Hay’ from the Dallis Lute Book of 1600, and ending with ‘Planxty by Carolan” from The Compositions of Carolan of c.1742, From the Sources will create a poetic echo of that soundscape in the Glucksman Gallery, and open the “treasure house” of Fleischmann’s collection to generations of musicians, listeners and scholars in Ireland and throughout the Irish music world.
Visit: http://www.glucksman.org
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