The West Cork Chamber Music Festival, in partnership with the Contemporary Music Centre, is pleased to announce the winners of the West Cork Chamber Music Festival / Cork County Council Young Composers Bursary Scheme 2013.
Seán Doherty, Retreat
Solfa Carlile, Fables
Timothy Cape, Collector's Item
Patrick Egan, Then Til Now
The selected works will be premiered at the 2013 West Cork Chamber Music Festival (Friday 28 June-Saturday 6 July) as well as being presented at the Festival’s Young Composers Forum, directed by Ian Wilson, on Saturday 29 June. Each winning composer will be awarded a Cork County Council Bursary of €500.
View the press release.
Background
The West Cork Chamber Music Festival in partnership with the Contemporary Music Centre has held a competition for young Irish composers for the last four years. Each year, works for chamber ensembles have been selected to be performed in concert during the Festival and as part of the Festival’s public workshop programme. The competition has been a valuable opportunity for young composers to work with professional performers, to receive guidance from a leading composer and to hear their works performed.
To mark Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, the 2013 Cork County Council Bursary Awards is expanded through special programme support from the Arts Council and Cork County Council under the Cultural Programme of the EU Presidency, with additional support from IMRO. The scheme is organised in partnership with the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland, Music Information Centre, Austria, the Arts Office of Cork County Council and CIT Cork School of Music.
Young composers were invited to submit a new work of 5-8 minutes in length scored for string quartet, and based or derived from one of more of the melodies collected by Edward Bunting. The 240th anniversary of the birth of Edward Bunting takes place in 2013 and the Festival is marking this anniversary through the Bursary Scheme. Bunting is arguably the most significant of the early collectors of Irish music who, through his attendance at the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792 and other collecting tours, assembled the primary collection of ancient Irish harp music.
Workshop on Writing for String Quartet
This year, in addition to the Bursary Award the Festival offered young composers the opportunity to submit an extract of a quartet-in-progress for consideration at a workshop which was led by composer Deirdre Gribbin and the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet in CIT Cork School of Music on Friday 8 February 2013. The young composers selected for this prestigious workshop were: Sinéad Finegan; Galen Mac Caba; Seán Doherty; David Collier; Hollas Longton and Darragh Kearns-Hayes. The workshop was an important opportunity for the selected composers to address technical issues of writing for string quartet through hearing the work-in-progress played by a professional string quartet, and young composer Seán Doherty went on to become one of the winners of the 2013 bursaries.. View photos from the workshop.
For details of the scheme, see full Terms and Conditions.
For details of previous competitions and winners, see Past Competition Winners 2008-2012.
Photos (top to bottom): Seán Doherty, Solfa Carlile, Timothy Cape, Patrick Egan
