Roger Landes Features in Contemporary Piece Based on Irish Reel
It’s too late for you to catch the performance but nonetheless there was an interesting article in FYI about NewEar, a Kansas City ensemble that specializes in contemporary chamber music.
One of six new and recent works featured on NewEar’s performance over the weekend at Unity on the Plaza was by Paul Elwood, a Wichita native who works and teaches in Colorado.
New Mexico, just outside Taos, was where Elwood wrote “In Blue Spaces”. On sabbatical, sitting on his cabin porch, it gave him access to the desert landscape, the distant blue horizon, and Roger Landes:
“From where I was sitting,” he said, “I could see dust storms rising, rain approaching.”
He captured his experience in a score for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, viola, cello and solo bouzouki, the stringed instrument most associated with Irish, Greek and Middle Eastern music. The last will feature his friend Roger Landes, longtime member of the Kansas City Celtic music group Scartaglen, now living in Taos.
“Roger is one of the foremost virtuosos of the bouzouki,” Elwood said. “I based the piece loosely on an Irish reel, ‘The Star of Munster,’ and transformed it. And I built it around his virtuosity.”
Read the whole article by Steve Paul. Most of it is about a doctoral candidate at UMKC’s Conservatory of Music called Narong Prangcharoen.
AS the event has passed, it is not posted on the Kansas City Irish events calendar.
See Also:
• Scartaglen & the beginnings of Irish Music in Kansas City
• The Janissary Stomp: Roger Landes & Chipper Thompson
• Kansas Uilleann Piper Lauded for Pirate Queen
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