5 April: UCD Arts & Humanities Annual College Lecture

Weird Hibernia

The College of Arts and Humanities in partnership with the School of Music cordially invites you to the 5th Annual College Lecture 'Weird Hibernia', which will be delivered by Professor Jennifer Walshe.

What is Ireland? Is it a country? A construct? A place people live or the staging ground for Joyce’s Ulysses and Game of Thrones? And what is Irish music? John Field? Enya? AI-generated seannós?

Composer Jennifer Walshe’s work has continually focussed on unpacking and interrogating Irish identity. In this talk, Walshe will discuss how Irishness is explored in works such as Aisteach, a fictional archive of Irish avant-garde music, ULTIMATE CHILL DANNY BOY MEGAMIX, which features over 300 recordings of Danny Boy, and Ireland: A Dataset, a work which uses AI to look at a country dealing with the legacy of colonialism, a country in which everything from landscape to identity has been idealised, appropriated and remixed.

Biography

“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, was released on Tetbind in 2020. The album uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford. Her work was recently profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

This lecture will take place in the Cedar Cyprus Room of the UCD University Club, on Wednesday, 5 April 2023, at 6pm sharp. Refreshments will be served.

Booking is essential. Tickets are offered on a first-come first-served basis.