Part of the Sonic Vigil presents: In Your Own Time and Place 3-day festival of improvised music

Ireland’s unique experimental music group Quiet Music Ensemble performs music by Irish and international composers including Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, Anna Murray, Irene Murphy and the world premiere of a new work by dancer Inma Pavon.

About ‘Aioi: leaves laden with words’

Aioi: leaves laden with words is based on the Japanese Noh play Takasago, the imagery of the pine and the space between worlds. The pine is a symbol of longevity and for liminality, for the rocking back and forth between the imagined and the real.

The score for Aioi: leaves laden with words is a set of 6 unique paintings, one for each performer - versions of the pine tree found at the back of the Noh stage. The performers improvise in response to their painting, to the story of Takasago, and the sound of wind in the pines.

Following this was Anna Murray’s Aioi: leaves laden with words (2022). The musicians improvised on the basis of a graphic score – a set of suiboku-ga ink wash paintings of Murray’s, each depicting the pine tree at the back of a traditional Noh stage – and were joined by Noh chanter Laura Sampson. The musicians were arrayed around the circumference of the stage like trees around a forest clearing, and created, along with some taped birdsong, an inviting bed of sound into which Sampson, kneeling in the centre, intoned, in Noh style, the encomium to the trees of Ireland in the tale of Buile Suibhne. The affect of the piece – particularly regarding Suibhne’s madness – was delicately ambiguous, and entirely compelling. The Journal of Music