Notes to A Star
A Conversation with Beethoven and Shakespeare
Created by Regina Crowley and Gabriela Mayer,
and featuring Eanna Hardwicke
Early Booking advised
Audience limited
This sound installation explores a creative dialogue between fragments of piano music and dramatic text, inviting people into a ‘listening oasis’. First shared on the rooftop of the MTU Blackrock Castle Observatory, it is now to be shared in the wonderful grounds of Nano Nagle.
Some notes: a sequence of piano sounds first played in Vienna over 200 years ago.
Other notes: observations spoken on stage in London 400 years ago, reflected on by the composer two centuries later.
Over time these notes become famous, then less so. They became a hidden treasure, yet they speak of fundamental human experience as relevant to us now as to the audiences who first heard them. Individually, Gabriela and Regina have explored and performed these notes by Beethoven and Shakespeare for as long as they can remember. More recently, they have collaborated in finding new resonances between music and words, and added their own voices to the conversation.
You may be familiar with some of the melodies. You will likely have heard some of the words. Once the playing has finished and the voices are silent, the notes will continue.
As part of this very special event, the Blackrock Castle Observatory encoded and beamed this show to a distant exoplanet system – Bran and Tuiren on 21/6/21. It will take many years for these sounds to arrive at their destination. Whatever changes those years bring us, these notes (sent to us from another time) will continue to play – accompanying our onward explorations.
