Shapeshifting soundwork featured in talk at Elms College Irish Cultural Center

 

Fulbright scholar Ciara Cosgrove to present on Irish legends and storytelling

Irish Cultural Center at Elms College: March 21

Cosgrove's talk, delving into the mythic Tuatha de Danann and the Ulster & Fenian Irish story cycles, will feature new soundwork of mine.  All the Flesh of His Body weaves together Irish and English recitation of passages from the first century pre-Christian epic Táin Bó Cúailgne describing the "warp spasms" that transform and mutate the body of the warrior-hero Cu Chulainn as he prepares to enter battle, with field recordings of boars, bears, whales, birds, elk, alligators and bats, and Arvo Part’s Magnificat.  This fluid mixing, and ultimate overtaking of the human by the animal, is emblematic of an Irish sensibility evolved in an archipelagic environment where sea, land and air ceaselessly arise and fall within the mist, merging and dissipating, continuously intermingling.