Ill-defined. A decrepit stream-of-consciousness hymnal with redacted or erased pages. Hook rug art made of existential crises. Sing-along choruses with intrusive thoughts. Jellied salads made of curious dread. Mania. Doom. Doldrums. Side 1 of Kate Bush’s The Dreaming. The opening verse of Love’s The Red Telephone. The entirety of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Demons. Reapers. It’s fine.

"We let the weirdness in.”

Kate Bush: Leave it Open, The Dreaming

A piece investigating at least three things at once: how a musician comes to be, what we carry with us, band dynamics, and humour.

At the start, try to be like others. Take on feedback and norms, criticism, teaching and invitations. Try to fit in. Then try to strike out. Do a job while building a team. How does a new ensemble form? How can they learn to fly in formation? The reviews and the output keep scrolling. You are the pilot and the plane. Is it possible to be light-hearted, to be curious and to laugh, flying in this red sky? While the information rushes past?

This work was created with the financial assistance of a Commission Award, funded by the Arts Council/An Chomhaírle Ealaíon.

Úna Monaghan, with Emily DeDakis and Stone Drawn Circles

can you hear me now??? was commissioned by ensemble mosaik as part of their UpToThree Series and premiered on Dec. 8th, 2019 by Ernst Surburg, Mathis Mayr and Ute Wassermann. The theme for this series was ‘text und sprache’ and this piece is a continuing exploration into language as a necessity of pure communication that aligns more directly with its origins in nature and in animal calls. This piece explores the sound, shape, gesture, tone and contour of communication calls in nature and develops a new language between the players and the recorded environment. can you hear me now??? also continues to employ my aural scores + parts, as alternate methods of communication with performers within the context of working with sounds/materials from outside of the Western Art Tradition. Specifically this approach allows performers and environmental sounds/places to come together, so as to temporarily alter the shared performance/listening environment.

This piece consists of five English translations of Afghan Landays set to music. The Landay is an Afghan form of poetry consisting of a single couplet in Pashto, one of two national languages of Afghanistan. Commonly shared orally amongst Pashtan women, they are sung aloud, sometimes with the beat of a hand drum. They typically address themes of love, grief, homeland, war, and separation. Like all music, they were banned by the Taliban during 1996 – 2001, and likely again now given the recent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Landays are rebellious and powerful, belying the notion of Afghan women as submissive or defeated. They are strong, resilient, pollical, creative and rebellious.

The graphic scores are made by tracing over a photographs of Afghan women under an aircraft, from a photograph by Seamus Murphy. The work explores the potential of graphic notation to reflect or ‘contain’ certain aural (oral) traditions that may evolve of time. The Landays are translated into English by Eliza Griswold.

This work was created with the financial assistance of a Music Commission Award, funded by the Arts Council/An Chomhaírle Ealaíon on the invitation of Lina Androvska.

Cat Hope July 2022

At the height of the Covid Pandemic UK Conservative peer Michelle Mone together with her financial investor husband Doug Barrowman set up a company called PPE MEDPRO in order to claim £202 million worth of contracts to supply the government with masks and gowns. The contract came about through Mone’s personal connections with the lead minister in the cabinet office Michael Gove. Baroness Mone (as she was then known) continuously denied having any connection with PPE MEDPRO but later admitted to repeatedly lying to the press and to the government about her involvement. The pair personally pocketed over £60 million in profit from the contract with £29 million being deposited directly into Mone’s personal account. The majority of items supplied by PPE MEDPRO proved to be unusable and were destroyed.

A Call To Arms is one of a series of works that explores aspects of contemporary greed. The text is a transcription of a television interview Mone gave with Barrowman and BBC journalist Laura Kuenssberg in which she protests: “I don't honestly see there's a case to answer. I can't see what we've done wrong”. Michelle Mone was recently stripped of her Baroness title.

‘A Call To Arms’ by Brian Irvine was commissioned by the Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland for Stone Drawn Circles, supported by PRS Foundation Beyond Borders funding.