Audiences at this Friday's lunchtime concert were treated to the world premiere of Surface Patterns, a new work for piano by composer and RIAM Faculty member Jonathan Nangle commissioned by New Music Dublin. The new work was performed by Máire Carroll in the breathtaking surroundings of the National Gallery of Ireland.
In 1787 Ernst Chladni published his text Entdeckungen über die Theorie des Klanges ('Discoveries in the Theory of Sound'), in which he detailed his experiment for the visualisation of nodal patterns on a surface. This involved drawing a bow over a piece of metal whose surface was lightly covered with sand. The plate was bowed until it reached resonance when the vibration causes the sand to move and concentrate along the nodal lines where the surface is still, outlining the nodal lines. The patterns formed by these lines are what are now called Chladni figures. Different resonant frequencies create different visual patterns. It was these surface patterns and the ways in which they shift between resonant frequencies that inspired this piece. This, in turn, led me to think about other surface patters, such as those created by wind and rain on sand or the surface of water, and how these natural phenomena might be represented through music." Jonathan Nangle
The concert programme—a collaboration between exceptional musicians from the Royal Irish Academy of Music and their musical counterparts from the Paris Conservatoire—also included music by Sebastian Adams, Luciano Berio, Gyorgy Kurtág, John Maxwell Geddes, as well as Aílis Ní Ríain’s Under the Rose, inspired by a number of paintings by Jack B. Yeats.