LARISSA O'GRADY

Dublin Alive 2021

Meeting House Square September 2021

About DISCORD Sculpture/Skate/Violin

In 2021 I began collaborating with sculptor, Alex Pentek and the composer, Sam Perkin. The new piece we created, DISCORD, especially for Dublin City Arts Office and Dublin City Council was performed on Sunday September 26th 2021 in Meeting House Square, Dublin.

DISCORD is a musical performance in a newly created deployable, origami-inspired, concert stage that can change form and be skateboarded.

The new artistic work, which blurs the line between performance and installation, is a musical performance which includes a new work for solo violin with an electronic element, performed in front the structure, along with the amplification of sounds of skateboarding on the wooden structure itself – finishing with skateboarders taking ownership of the structure as it is being compressed flat – using the structure as a skate prop to skate on and around.

Funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media

Shadow Once Complete

A collaborative text based project with composer David Bremner and writers Kit Fryatt and Joanna Walsh.

“During March 2022, in venues in Dublin, Cork and Limerick Béal presented ‘shadow once complete’ a new collaboration, developed from the Contemporary Music Centre’s CMC Colleagues scheme, between violinist Larissa O’Grady and composer David Bremner. They have devised an ‘algorithmic storytelling’ combining algorithmic text, live electronics and lattice-based improvisation on violin.

The storytelling is done by the violinist, whose pitches and dynamics act on the patch, prompting weighted-random projected text. The use of the MUGIC® bow motion sensor adds an extra element.

Béal have commissioned new texts for the performances from Joanna Walsh and Kit Fryatt.

The print studio venues were chosen in response to the text-based nature of the work. The event is designed as a really immersive experience for an audience.

The piece is concerned with how meaning is constructed by an audience from limited building blocks, the invisible connections between words, making this process explicit, so a ‘constructivist’ setting works nicely: an assemblage of scattered partly-made artefacts is the perfect backdrop.”

RESONATE 

Music Network Artist in Residence 2021

August-November 2021 // Concert at the Dock Arts, Carrick-on-Shannon in Spring 2022

A solo violin programme with mixed-media which also inspires a new cohort of nature lovers to engage with nature on a local level at Lough Key Forest Park.

Video footage, captured by filmmaker Nestor Romero Clemente, will be projected onto the wall behind me during the performance of Michael Gordon’s piece ‘Tree-Oh’. 

I have commissioned award winning Irish composer Sam Perkin to write a new work for solo violin with pre-recorded electronic part. 

American composer Andrew Norman’s 2008 work for solo violin includes many extended techniques for solo violin – showing a rarely-seen (in one contemporary piece) range of colour and texture for the instrument. This piece speaks to the observational nature of this concert programme, aimed at zooming in and looking and listening to our landscape and habitats. This programme will present those observations in an artistic form, to amplify the power of critically engaging with breath-taking beauty in our immediate surroundings.

During the course of this residency I will aim to give more insights into these new compositions by living composers – by giving an introduction to the pieces, sharing descriptions on extended violin techniques within the pieces and discussing the natural element in the video recordings.