What is Living and What is Dead? An Original Work for Solo Piano by Simon O’Connor
30 January 2014, 8.00 pm
The Pepper Canister Church, 2 Mount Street Crescent, Dublin 2, Ireland
Simon O’Connor, composer and founder member of Dublin psych-rock band The Jimmy Cake, embarks on a major solo project with maverick production company / record label Ergodos. An uncompromisingly tonal and beautiful large scale work for solo piano, What is living and what is dead is far removed from the music of O’Connor’s rock past – here he reaches further back to the romantics of Schumann and Schubert, whilst channeling the iconoclastic modernism of Morton Feldman, Kevin Volans and post-rock. Childlike melodies are pitched against ever changing harmonic landscapes, in a desperate plea for beauty in a world gone austere. This is not contemporary music – it is a wordless political polemic that cries out for more space, beauty, slowness and understanding in a time of pessimism and intellectual voids.
“There is a life within this music that I cannot release myself,” says O’Connor. “Like a song, it is for the performer and listener to breathe their own life and understanding into it. It is in sympathy with an older tradition of music that approaches the listener at both emotional and intellectual levels, rather than placing up barriers to understanding. I believe that right now, the world doesn’t need difficult art that makes an audience feel stupid – it needs art that can help us deal with the society we are inheriting, art that shows us the possibility of a more beautiful world. That is what this music is trying to achieve.”
Tickets are €15/10 and are available here.
