FUAIM Concert: The Vanbrugh Ensemble & Friends, 29/09/23 1.10pm, St. Fin Barre's Cathedral

17 Sep 2023

Happening On 06/10/2023

GUIDING BELLS is produced by Once Off Productions and presented in association with Cork City Council, University College Cork, FUAIM Music at UCC, UCC Quercus Talented Students Programme, CACSSS, and Sounds from a Safe Harbour.

Renowned as an innovative performer, Tony-nominated composer and inspirational teacher, rooted in traditional music and committed to collaborating across diverse music genres, cultures and art forms, Mel Mercier has had a profound influence on the formation of a generation of Irish musicians. His visionary creative leadership has charted a new course for third level music education in Ireland, setting the standard for truly cross-cultural, diverse and inclusive music practice and research.

Mercier formed the Irish Gamelan Orchestra at University College Cork in 2013, and its fifteen members are all graduates of UCC Department of Music. One of Ireland’s leading contemporary music ensembles, its profile has grown both nationally and internationally in the past decade. The group has collaborated with a host of high-profile guest artists including Fiona Shaw, Joseph O’Connor, Martin Hayes, Duke Special and Julie Feeney in performances throughout Ireland, the UK and Java.

In GUIDING BELLS the ensemble will perform perform its unique repertoire of new music and dance as well as new arrangements of songs by Schubert and Purcell on the bronze gongs and metallophones of Nyai Sekar Madu Sari (Venerable Flower of Honey Essence), the first Irish gamelan, which was made in 1994 for University College Cork by one of Indonesia’s leading gongsmiths, Pak Tentrem Sarwanto, at his forge in Surakarta, Central Java.