The amazing sounds of Donegal will radiate around Dublin tonight when the Inishowen Traditional Music Project bring its specially commissioned work Inishowen to The National Concert Hall.
This new suite of music is performed by the Inishowen Trad Orchestra and Choir (a 150-piece ensemble) and is an expansive journey through a millennium of the musical heritage of Ireland’s most northerly peninsula.
This work is an ITMP production, and the concert performance has been sponsored by Donegal County Council.
The group says their performance on a national stage will be the pinnacle of over twenty years of work by the Inishowen Traditional Music Project (ITMP), which is a voluntary community project.
Composer, producer and musicologist Martin Tourish, who will be conducting the performance, selected and arranged the music, as part of a commission and artist’s residency funded by the Arts Council, Inishowen Development Partnership and Donegal County Council.
The musical suite of five movements starts with Deus Meus, which was written by Mael Ísu Ua Bhrolcháin whose death was recorded in the Annals of the Four Masters as having occurred in 1086. He was educated at the monastery of Both Chonais in the townland of Carrowmore, now in the parish of Culdaff.
Martin proceeds to take us on a journey of music and song that spans over a thousand years. He has uncovered gems from Honoria Galwey’s Old Irish Croonauns and Other Tunes, published in 1910. Honoria Galwey was born in 1830 and lived in Moville for 22 years, where she was an enthusiastic collector of the songs and tunes of the area.
In a movement dedicated to noted Buncrana musician and teacher Dinny McLaughlin, Martin has sensitively captured the many attributes of this veritable legend of Irish music. Dinny is now in his mid-eighties and has devoted his life to music through playing, teaching, and composing. He is a formidable character and Martin has captured his humour, rascality, and emotion in this movement. In one of Dinny’s reels called Skip About, Martin challenges the musicians with his arrangement set in the style of the great classical master of humour, Franz Joseph Haydn.
The fifth and final movement features the music of the Clonmany Céilí Band, Seamus Grant, Paddy, and Tom Byrne. It celebrates the ‘Big Nights’, an Inishowen expression for a great night of music and craic.
To find out more about tonight’s magical event see here.
