Nope – nothing whatsoever to do with the Hope Diamond. Let me explain.

Earlier this year, I got the notion into my head that it would be a good idea to aim towards recording the Beethoven Violin Concerto, seeing as it’s my favourite concerto in the whole world, ever, and also probably the one piece of music I’ve spent the most time on over the course of my violin playing life. So I decided to ask my old friend, the hugely talented composer Ciaran Hope, to write me a concerto to record with it, a piece that would be tailored towards me and my playing, and stand alone in its own right, and also complement the Beethoven on the album or in concert. Luckily for me, he was extremely taken with the idea, as he expresses below in his paragraphs about our project! I was pretty sure we’d find some way to make it a reality given how much we both wanted it, and lo and behold, when we asked, the Arts Council of Ireland kindly gave us some extraordinarily generous support towards this goal!

The plan is to work very closely together – Ciaran is 100% the composer of the concerto, while I will be making suggestions, trying out what he’s written, and helping to tailor the piece to my style, my sound, and my instrument.

Every step of the creative process will be documented and posted online. As far as we know, this hasn’t actually been done before! Did I mention that Ciaran lives in LA, and I in Dublin? Yes – Skype will more than likely be facilitating this whole thing. We are still ironing out the technical details. For example, right now I’m on the road with Nigel Kennedy, and probably won’t get online for a few days because I’ll be up in the mountains somewhere in Poland; I also forgot my camcorder, and am not sure how to do video capture with Skype! However, the project is due to start rolling for real very soon, and we’ll simply have to come up with a good system for doing the work and making it available for anyone to see. We’re going to have a separate blog dedicated to the concerto at http://www.hopeconcerto.wordpress.com, a twitter, a youtube channel, etc. Hopefully it will be interesting to a few people other than the two of us!

I’m so incredibly excited about this thing, I can’t even put it into words! Plus, I’m only going to be online for about the next 5 minutes! So have some of Ciaran’s instead!

Bucket List - A list of things to do before you die [Comes from the term "kicked the bucket"]

You know, if I really sit back and think about it, there are only a few things I would like to have on my bucket list; score a memorable movie trilogy, learn to speak Hindi, climb Kilimanjaro, Everest….. But right up there on the top of my fantasy list, would be to actually write a concerto.

In all honesty, based on my pre-disposition to playing lots of clarinet, I imagined it might be a clarinet concerto when and if I got around to it. However, the only concerto to top that, would be a concerto for a musician I truly respond to and resonate with. I always loved the stories about Mozart writing concertos for musicians he often understood so well that he didn’t even mark in their expression markings. What amazing synergy!

When I first heard Cora Lunny making music, I was enchanted. I was listening to her playing Beethoven at the RTE Musician of the Future contest in 1998. I was there as a composer, and I was attending all the competition rounds, because I could and figured why not! Out of everyone, Cora was the one player I just couldn’t get enough of. That was my experience at the time. I mean, I literally ran out to HMV at the end of her performance to buy Beethoven’s violin concerto and that piece ended up becoming my favorite piece of music!

After hearing Cora devour Paganini on the final night, I was officially in love with her violin playing, although still a little too shy to walk up to a 16 year old girl after the awards to tell her in the middle of a throng of well-wishers that I thought she was amazing.

Years later I finally reached out and you know what? We actually became fast friends, started to hang out, talk music and work on some film scores. The symbiosis has been amazing and I have always been excited to hear what music we can make on our journey.

Today, I am thrilled to be in the ridiculously fortunate position of having to write Cora a violin concerto. With the help of an Arts Council Project Award, I get to live out a dream and spend time writing a very personal piece of music for a very dear friend and incredibly talented musician. My brain is spinning with ideas, and I am trying to slowly bring order back to the flow of creativity that is trying to burst through.

For now, It seems I will actually get to knock one of those items off my bucket list

- Ciaran Hope http://www.myspace.com/ciaran

This Sunday at the Unitarian Church on St. Stephen’s Green, the Young Hearts Run Free collective is staging a literary event at which Kate Ellis and I will be providing some music. I just found out today that Claire Kilroy will be reading! She is the author of Tenderwire, one of my favourite books, and certainly one of the best music-related novels out there (I should know, the Independent rashly let me review it). It should be a lovely afternoon – feel free to spread the word, as it’s for a good cause!

When Eyjafjallajokull expectorated her fine dust into the clear skies of Europe, I found myself stranded in Amsterdam with no violin, having been whisked off for a break by my beloved. For the first time in my life, I had gone away fully intending not to practice. It was only for a couple of days! It should have been fine! Murphy’s law, eh? So I found a wonderful music shop where they were amazingly kind, and sorted me out with a violin and bow to practice on until I could get home. I must admit it wasn’t so bad, being stuck in Amsterdam in great company. It really could have been a lot worse.

I was very lucky to get hold of a violin, because next Tuesday I’m playing the Beethoven concerto in Bulgaria!

The Beethoven is my absolute favourite violin concerto of all time. As part of my daily practice routine, I played this concerto every day for years and years, and it is still my favourite thing to play as a warm-up before a concert, when I have that luxury. To me, it has a sort of mystical quality – the harmonic changes are just so perfect, the orchestration so balanced, and yet it is so much more than a beautiful, well-constructed concerto! It has a very functional quality, which I love. It is elegant and beautiful, without frippery.

Read more…

Hello, world!

Before I update, I’d like to mention that I am seeking a personal manager to replace the last one, who was terrible. I’m not one to badmouth former colleagues, but since I’m still working with her on a daily basis I think it’s ok. She knows she’s about to get fired and what does she do? Goes on the internet and blogs, and practices her viola. Yes, time for my confession – I’m a terrible, terrible self manager! If you are interested, please email me at lunnymusic at gmail dot com, or leave me a comment here. There is more information on this page.

My last blog post sent me into an odyssey of contemplation, hence the lack of updates here. It’s quite understandable, given the intense depth I reached with my writing. I’m pretty proud of having made myself speechless!

Um, well, actually, the truth is, I fell in love and had better things to do than write navelgazing rants about music and stuff. My good friend Stewart said there’s a six-month grace period for not having your shit together when that happens, and he knows what he’s talking about.

The last 8 months have been bursting with inspiration and education. Yurodny have improved like mad, and our gig at the ’09 Cork Jazz Festival is, will be, or has been broadcast all over the USA! One of my favourite things that happened last year was playing the Mendelssohn concerto with John Finucane and the Hibernian Chamber Orchestra – joyful, uplifting performances of a joyful work. One of my other favourite things was touring with the genius composer and santour player Javid Afsari Rad and his absolutely stellar group of musicians – an experience that really shook me up and educated me, made me very frustrated with the limitations of western musical notation, and caused me to fall quite firmly in love with Iranian percussion. And then there was Mamoru Fujieda and his magical Patterns of Plants – and the incredible discovery (for me, personally) of his beautiful works for solo violin. I wish I could do verbal justice to all of these projects, which moved me, shook me up, and improved me as a musician. Perhaps I’ll still write about them. But I’d rather play about them.

And on that note – among all the other concerts you can read about to your left, I’ll be performing some of Fujieda’s solo violin music at the CFCP on February 26th. The concert’s main remit is ICC composers (I’m playing new, specially commissioned works for solo viola by Francis Heery, Dylan Rynhart and Amanda Feery), which is truly awesome, but in the meantime I’m really looking forward to revisiting Mr. Fujieda’s incredible additions to the solo violin repertoire.

Must dash! Lunch appointment awaits me!

What is “music”?

According to good old Wikipedia, “Music is an art form whose medium is sound organized in time. Common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture.”

I don’t think it’s so simple. Or rather, I think it’s much, much simpler. I disagree that sound is the medium – I think sound is one of many tools we use, and that the true medium is time.

Since a huge part of musical experience lies in the perception of the listener, there is a limit to how much effect we can have as performers. Two people could be sitting next to each other at the same concert: while one is lost in a reverie, in a total state of bliss, unaware of time passing, the other is fidgeting, wishing it were over, and irritated by the experience. The various barriers to acceptance which exist in the mind of the listener can be manifold, and it’s easy enough to quite unwittingly do things to distract a listener from focusing and being drawn in completely. Also, to really allow yourself to be moved by live music is a very personal and private experience – it doesn’t necessarily happen so easily for everyone in a public concert environment. Still, though, it is the listener’s experience of time which is affected.

When we get it “right”, as performers, and draw in the audience thoroughly, we make time spin unbelievably fast for the listener. I remember being 9 years old and seeing Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi at the NCH. The concert was over almost before I realised it had started! I remember the whole concert as an intense rush of focused excitement. I’m sure that was not everybody’s experience of that concert. Some of the audience might have been distracted by Nigel’s outfit, maybe it took them longer to be drawn in. But for me, it was incredibly inspiring, and probably my first experience of the strangeness that can occur in seemingly everyday experience.

And when we get it wrong, we can make time seem endless. How is it that when time is such a valuable thing, it seems to stretch on stickily, back-achingly and sock-itchingly when we are not enjoying ourselves? It’s fairly hard to ignore music you don’t like when you’re stuck in a seat, in public.

It works the other way, too. Sometimes you sit on the stage and genuinely wonder whether you, and everyone else, have had a memory lapse and gone back to the beginning of a piece, because it seems at least twice as long as it should be. Or, as happened last week in the Beckett Theatre, everyone agrees that a certain piece seemed incredibly short – although it was no faster than in rehearsal, everything was repeated the same amount of times, etc. I always think that’s a good sign. And when Judith remarked on a specific piece and said I had played particularly well, I could not remember anything about it – I knew we had played it, I remembered the piece before and after, but it was like a miniature blackout. Musical oblivion and pure bliss!

It’s a funny old business we’re in, and continually full of pleasant surprises.

Unbeknownst to the beleaguered citizens of Europe, WWII is roaring to an end. Lebanon and Syria achieve independence, the 2-year Siege of Leningrad is finally lifted. Between New York City and Asheville, NC, Bela Bartók, ravaged by still-undiagnosed leukaemia, completes his Sonata for Solo Violin (Sz. 117, BB 124).

(I imagine him stuffing it into a manila envelope addressed to Mr. Yehudi Menuhin, gluing it shut, and strolling down to the mailbox on the street corner. This is what greets him at the newsstand where he stops for a stamp.)

New Yorker cover, March 1944 (c) the artist or publisher

Soon after, his native land, Hungary, is occupied by Germany.

Yurodny, Button Factory, May 29th '09

do come along.