Contemporary Composition Perspectives Series || Rhodri Davies
Date of Event: Thursday, 13th February 2025
For the next lecture in our Contemporary Composition Perspectives series we are delighted to welcome harpist Rhodri Davies. He will be discussing his collaborations with the ground-breaking composer Éliane Radigue, including the work Occam 1. The lecture is in collaboration with the festival Reception Weekend, in which Rhodri is performing on February 15th.
All are welcome: the lecture takes place in room EQ-111, East Quad, TU Dublin on Thursday February 13th 4pm-6pm.
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations and has released eight solo albums. His regular groups include: HEN OGLEDD, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: Derek Bailey, Hamid Drake, Simon H Fell, Will Gaines, Jenny Hval, Sofia Jernberg, Kahimi Karie, Lina Lapelyte, Nicole Mitchell, Butch Morris, David Sylvian, Pat Thomas and Otomo Yoshihide.
For the last twelve years Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing eighteen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Mariam Rezaei, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
In 2008 he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Abertawe.