at Chilwell Road Methodist Church

Date: Fri 13th Mar
Time: 19:30

Village Ventures concert at Chilwell Road Methodist Church, Beeston features Chris Newman and Máire Ní Chathasaigh.

It is on Friday, March 13th at 7.30 p.m. Tickets are £8 (£6 in advance), Student/Child £3 and are available from the church office - 0115 9431164.

www.oldbridgemusic.com is a link to the performers website.

Female Musician of the Year 2004
Máire Ní Chathasaigh
"This harp player has reinvented the traditional harp. She and her S/O, Chris Newman, are indescribable, as his guitar vituousity joins her musical genius. How often do you get to hear someone reinvent an instrument, like Miles Davis on trumpet, Ray Charles on piano, along with Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller or Django Reinhardt on guitar, Jerry Mulligan on sax and Máire Ní Chathasaigh on harp. Really. Truly. Good Lord, this woman is a wonder!!"

Bill Margeson, The Chicago Irish American News

"If Máire wasn’t around, Irish harping would be so much the poorer:
her work restores the harp to its true voice." - The Irish Times

MÁIRE grew up in a well-known West Cork musical family & began to play the harp at the age of eleven. Using her knowledge of the idiom of the living oral Irish tradition, she developed a variety of new techniques, particularly in relation to ornamentation, with the aim of establishing an authentically traditional style of harping. As a teenager her originality was quickly recognised: having won the All-Ireland & Pan-Celtic Harp Competitions several times, a number of TV & radio broadcasts followed.

In 1985 she recorded the first harp album ever to concentrate on traditional Irish dance music, The New-Strung Harp, described by The Irish Examiner as “an intensely passionate and intelligent record… a mile-stone in Irish harp music”. The techniques which she invented for the purpose have been profoundly influential - “a single-handed reinvention of the harp”. She has been giving masterclasses in Europe and the USA since the mid-1970s with the result that her ideas and techniques are now very widely disseminated. 2003 will be her eighteenth year as senior tutor at the Cúirt Chruitireachta (Harp Summer School) organised by Cairde na Cruite (The Irish Harp Society) in Termonfeckin, Co Louth, where harpers come from all over the world to study with her. Within the last couple of years she’s been harp tutor at Milwaukee Irish Fest Summer School and at Boston College’s “Gaelic Roots”. Two books of her arrangements, The Irish Harper Vols. I & II, have been published by Old Bridge Music. She holds an honours degree in Celtic Studies from University College Cork. She contributed two articles about the Irish harp and modes in Irish music to the Companion to Irish Traditional Music (Cork University Press) & is profiled in Celtic Women in Music (Mairéad Sullivan, Quarry Music Books, Canada).

Máire is harp & voice soloist with the New English Chamber Orchestra & the Choir of New College Oxford on John Cameron's Missa Celtica (Erato Disques, Paris). The Goldcrest film Driftwood features her singing, and her harping & compositions feature with other Celtic music luminaries on Dan ar Braz's Gold Disc-awarded album Finisterres (Sony France). She & Chris Newman are featured on the major BBC 2 TV series on Irish music Bringing it All Back Home - the associated BBC book features a large photograph of Máire on the front cover – and on Polygram USA’s major 1998 Celtic harp album & associated PBS TV special Celtic Harpestry.

She's perfomed at many harp festivals around the world, most recently the Ninth World Harp Congress held in Dublin in July 2005, where in addition to participating in the opening concert in St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, she gave a rare solo concert as part of the Celtic Highlights series. (The concert she shared with Gráinne Yeats at the 1993 World Harp Congress in Copenhagen marked the first occasion on which the Irish harp was featured at the Congress - primarily a classical music event.) She's also performed at the World Harp Festival (Cardiff) and Festivals held in Belfast, Dublin and Boston to commemorate the bicentennial of the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival.

Solo performances happen very rarely. Prior to her World Harp Congress concert in July of this year, her most recent solo concert was for the 2002 Birmingham Early Music Festival - having been coaxed into it by an old University friend (Dr Mary O'Neill, Director of the Festival and head of Birmingham University's Centre for Early Music Performance and Research)!

Máire holds an honours B.A. degree in Celtic Studies from University College Cork. Two books of her harp arrangements, The Irish Harper Volumes I and 2 have been published by Old Bridge Music.

She contributed two articles about the Irish harp and modes in Irish music to the Companion to Irish Traditional Music (Cork University Press) & is profiled in Celtic Women in Music (Mairéad Sullivan, Quarry Music Books, Canada). She's also profiled in the Rough Guide to Irish Music.

Máire now concentrates primarily on performance. However, she’s always placed a high priority on passing on her knowledge & techniques to the next generation, with the aim – now largely achieved - of re-integrating the Irish harp into the mainstream of the living oral Irish tradition. She has been giving masterclasses in Europe and the USA since the mid-1970s with the result that her ideas and techniques are now very widely disseminated. 2005 was her twentieth year as senior tutor at An Chúirt Chruitireachta, the Summer School/Festival organised by Cairde na Cruite (The Irish Harp Society) in Termonfeckin, Co Louth, where harpers come from all over the world to study with her.

She has taught in the past at the Cork School of Music (where she developed the first ever examination syllabus for non-pedal harp) and at the Leeds College of Music. She’s currently principal harp tutor for Newcastle University’s Folk B.Mus. course and has been a guest tutor for the University of Limerick's B.A. and M.A. courses.

CHRIS NEWMAN
"...one of the UK’s most staggering & influential acoustic guitarists” - Folk Roots

Chris is one of Britain’s leading guitarists and a prolific composer and arranger. He began to play the guitar at the age of four, spent his childhood playing folk music, dabbled in the jazz scene in his teens and spent many years with a variety of acoustic bands, producing an eclectic body of recorded material culminating in the release of his two solo albums Chris Newman and Chris Newman Two. A foray into the commercial music world resulted in a silver disc for producing The Oldest Swinger in Town – which reached No. 1 in the pop charts in many countries and No. 4 in the UK - to which he also composed the tune. One day in 1985 he decided he'd really rather play interesting music than pursue interesting paycheques and thereafter became immersed in the traditional music of Ireland and Scotland. His 1998 solo CD Fretwork was “a stunning & stylistically-varied album, heaving with good tunes, from one of the UK’s most staggering & influential acoustic guitarists” - Folk Roots. He has toured with Irish harper Máire Ní Chathasaigh since 1988.
Production & recording credits in the folk/traditional world include Clive Carroll’s Sixth Sense and Christy O'Leary's The Northern Bridge (both Old Bridge Music), Brendan Power’s New Irish Harmonica (Green Linnet) Steve Tilston & Maggie Boyle’s Of Moor and Mesa (Green Linnet) and Tom McConville & Pauline Cato’s By Land and Sea and The Surprise. His playing is also prominently featured on several albums, among them virtuoso Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell's Common Ground, Shetland fiddler Aly Bain’s Lonely Bird (both with Danny Thompson), BBC Young Tradition Award-winner Luke Daniels' Tarantella and Boys of the Lough’s The Day Dawn. In addition to his work with Máire, Chris toured until 1997 as a member of Boys of the Lough in North America, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Estonia, Denmark, China & Italy. The Scotsman said of his performance with them on two separate occasions: “...his fluid, wonderfully assured expansiveness produced a burst of quick-picked harmony here, some dense, resonant undercurrents there and flashes of snazzy, jazzy syncopation all over the place...” “Newman’s brilliant grasp of the idiom and swingy, authoritative playing give... a tremendous rhythmic and dynamic lift...”
His book of tunes, tips and technical advice Adventures with a Flatpick was published by Old Bridge Music in 2001. He is principal guitar tutor to Newcastle University’s Folk Music degree course and is much in demand at summer schools: within the last couple of years he has been a guitar tutor at Steve Kaufman’s Flatpicking Kamp in Maryville, Tennessee, at Milwaukee Irish Fest Summer School and at Boston College’s famed Gaelic Roots.

Chilwell Road Methodist Church

Chilwell Road
Beeston
Nottingham

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