THE UCC Festival of Contemporary Music, which took place last Friday and Saturday, is new to the music calendar. It's the brainchild of John Godfrey, a lecturer in music at UCC and also a member of the contemporary music, group Icebreaker.
The festival ran to half a dozen events, most involving local students, but also drawing on the services of the Band of the Southern Command and visiting composer/pianist Ian Wilson.
The first of the events I attended on Saturday brought together performers from the areas of jazz (a quintet led by Ronan Guilfoyle) and minimalism (the Waterford New Music Ensemble, directed by Eric Sweeney).
In the pieces heard on Saturday afternoon, both Guilfoyle and Sweeney could be said to embody extremes within the trends of music they represent, the former inclining towards a not entirely jazz-like compositional formality, the latter in his multi-keyboard pieces towards a style of sweet, easy-on-the-ear popsiness. On this occasion, the jazz proved the more musically engaging.
The evening concert, given in the acoustically-confining space of the Granary Theatre, was divided into three parts. The UCC New Music Ensemble gave the Irish premiere of Steve Reich's Tehillim, a psalm setting for voices, percussion and small ensemble.
John Godfrey suggested that his group's would be the first performance of Tehillim by non-professional performers.
And, if the surfaces were by no" means as polished as was desirable, there were some genuinely arresting moments, notably from the high soprano of Eimear McNally.
The subsequent simultaneous performance of two pieces by John Cage (replete with iconic coin-tossing, tape-recorder switching and meandering traditional musicians) had an extended aimlessness that was more patience-trying than stimulating.
The final piece, Marian Ingoldsby's short OTC-commissioned opera, Hot Food With Strangers, in a production which took little account of the performing space, showed itself to be a robust piece (no small credit to Judy, Kravis's libretto) and proved the hit of the evening.
