Rocīo Romero Grau with Jaimie Harris

Friday 18th November, Saturday 19th November - 10.00am - 5.00pm - Galway City Museum
Saturday 19th November - 4.00pm - 5.00pm Live performance and talk - Galway City Museum

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The melodies of Turlough O’Carolan are revisited by the Catalan pianist and visual artist Rocīo Romero Grau. She offers a contemporary engagement that begins to explore O’Carolan’s music as a space of transition between two eras: the ancient Irish musical tradition and the new European Baroque influences. This transitional perspective will allow Rocīo to situate O’Carolan’s baroque influence alongside new more contemporary approaches such as minimalist or jazz arrangements; as a result, the music of O’Carolan remains timeless and universal. This new approach attempts to reinterpret the music of the Irish harpist with contemporary ears, highlighting the originality and uniqueness of his melodies in our present context.

An original video installation will show how, through visual arts and music, the Catalan artist explores the historicity of O’Carolan, the big houses, the landscape, the families, among others; while at the same time investigates the cognitive conditions altered by the blind condition of the harpist, creating a world that moves from the visual to the sound, from the real to the abstract: mixing sounds, music, shape or movement in new artistic ways.

This contemporary approach shows how music is caught within a constant metamorphosis, especially through the international mixture of cultures and external influences. This cultural fusion opens new cultural roads for a better integration and understanding of diversity, while at the same time interrogating the space between tradition and new cultural outcomes. The project also offers a space for talks with historians, musicians or musicologists that open a deeper view about O’Carolan’s life and work, about tradition, culture and globalization.

Piano: Rocīo Romero Grau
Bass: Jaimie Harris

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