Tradition Now: Room To Rhyme

Our festival of new traditional and folk music takes over NCH with performances across four rooms... 

Room to Rhyme
Featuring Breanndán Begley, Colm Broderick, Moya Cannon, Brigid Mae Power, Dairena Ní Chinnéide, Neil Martin, Annemarie Ní Churraoin, Aisling Lyons, Colm Mac Con Iomaire, Susan McKeown, MayKay, Liam Ó Maonlaí, Steve Cooney, Éoghan Ó Ceannabháin, Andy Irvine, Áine Uí Cheallaigh, An Chéad Ghlúin Eile.

Diarmaid, Deirdre and Donncha Moynihan
Alannah Thornburgh
Rattling Ark

6:00 Diarmaid, Deirdre and Donncha Moynihan - NCH Studio
7:30 Room to Rhyme - Main Stage
9:00 Alannah Thornburgh - Kevin Barry Recital Room
10:00 Rattling Ark - NCH Studio

In 1968, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Davy Hammond went on a tour around Northern Ireland, reciting poems and singing songs. They travelled under the banner of Room to Rhyme.  
 
We wanted to remember those great poets and that great singer, hence the title of this event. Rhyme, as a noun, means simply a correspondence in sound between words. By extension, a repeated phrase or motif in a piece of music or in a song is also a rhyme, but rhythms can rhyme, and so can images. 
 
Rhyme is also a verb; to rhyme in its most expansive sense means to make for memory a tune, a song, a poem that shines and chimes where before there was empty dark, often to draw on tradition before making and offering something new and unexpected. I think that Seamus Heaney had this sense in mind when he wrote, in 'Personal Helicon' (dedicated, incidentally to Michael Longley) 
 
"... I rhyme / to see myself, to set the darkness echoing." 
 
What holds our poetry, song and music in an ongoing dance is a shared delight in the lyric impulse; celebrating that shared delight and its fruits is what Room to Rhyme is all about.  There is poetry in music and music in poetry, after all, an intertwining, a braiding of rivers and streams, coming down from the deep past and reaching, always reaching out to the unknown future. 
 
Diarmaid, Deirdre and Donncha Moynihan are widely considered to be three of Ireland’s leading traditional musicians. Their latest release Black Brook has received excellent critical acclaim with a 5 Star Irish Times review describing the album as "A remarkable collection.....three musicians reaching skywards on one of the albums of the year.”   
 
Alannah Thornburgh is an award-winning instrumentalist and composer from the wild west of Ireland with a focus on traditional Irish harp. Alannah’s music explores her family heritage, reimagining melodies from the Irish harping and American folk & jazz traditions. This cross-genre interaction and juxtaposition of old melodies with contemporary harmonies and technique is interwoven throughout her music, described as being ‘unforced, fluid and utterly at home in her own sound’ by The Irish Times.  
 
Rattling Ark is a new experimental folk project featuring Kevin Murphy, Thomas Haugh and Aki. While primarily drawing from the well of Irish folk its bloodlines also pulse with dark and psychedelic timbres. The use of non-traditional instruments helps to situate folk tunes and songs in other-worldly sonic contexts.  

**** Room to Rhyme is curated by Theo Dorgan and produced with ITMA.  

Presented by NCH in partnership with The Arts Council