Linda and Irene Buckley
Beethoven Reflected [2019]

Commissioned by the National String Quartet Foundation with funds from the Arts Council of Ireland

0.16 Linda Buckley – I Adagio Reflected
5.16 Linda Buckley – I Adagio Reflected II
8.18 Irene Buckley – VI Adagio Reflected
13.01 Linda Buckley – VII Allegro Reflected

Performed by the ConTempo Quartet
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 16th February 2020 (live audio recording)

Linda Buckley score available here
Irene Buckley score available here

These pieces were written for the second concert in NSQF’s spring 2020 Beethoven Reflected series celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. Movements I, VI and VII of Beethoven’s C Sharp Minor quartet, Op. 131 were the departure points for these reflections and they were performed alongside one another.

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Linda Buckley is an award winning Irish composer (born in Cork, 1979) who creates electronic and acoustic music, and has a particular interest in working across many disciplines, most notably film and in the realm of drone and dark ambient music. Her NMC record From Ocean’s Floor was featured by Iggy Pop on BBC Radio 6 as “beautiful music – here is somebody really special”. Her work has been described as “sublime and brilliant” (BBC Radio 3), “engaging with an area of experience that new music is generally shy of, which, simplified and reduced to a single word, I’d call ecstasy” (Bob Gilmore, Journal of Music). She has written extensively for orchestra (BBC Symphony Orchestra, RTÉ NSO), was elected to Aosdana in 2021, and is a member of the Screen Composers Guild of Ireland.

She has worked in many collaborative contexts including scoring film by Kathryn Ferguson (Nothing Compares co-composed with Irene Buckley, nominated for Best Score at the IFTA Awards and Cinema Eye Honors), Mark Cousins (Like a Huge Scotland and A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things), Pat Collins (That He May Face the Rising Sun co-composed with Irene Buckley, Living in a Coded Land, Henry Glassie: Field Work) and Tadhg O’Sullivan (To The Moon). Awards include a Fulbright scholarship to New York University, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Frankfurt Visual Music Award (for Silk Chroma) and Gold at the New York Festivals Radio Awards (for Mother’s Blood, Sister Songs documentary with Athena Media).

Recent collaborations include new work for Liam Byrne and Crash Ensemble, Gudrun Gut (Einstürzende Neubauten), Andrew Zolinsky (for Dark Music Days, hcmf and New Music Dublin). She was invited by John Schaefer’s New Sounds Live (WNYC) to present the New York premiere of a new live score to the silent horror film Nosferatu (co-composed with Irene Buckley) at Brookfield Place. Linda holds a Music Degree from University College Cork, a Masters in Music and Media Technologies and a PhD in Composition from Trinity College Dublin. She has lectured in Composition at Trinity College Dublin, Pulse College at Windmill Lane and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. In September 2020 her NMC record, From Ocean’s Floor was released: “The Irish composer combines traditional séan-nos singing with an electronic soundscape, connecting past and future … It’s clear how much Buckley deeply connects her past to her present, opening up possibilities for our mutual musical futures.” Guardian – Album of the Month, ‘a masterpiece in connecting the past and future.’ Evening Standard

Award winning composer Irene Buckley is active across many music disciplines including choral, opera, orchestral, dance, theatre, film and electronics.

Her score for Nothing Compares (co-composed with Linda Buckley) has received a Cinema Eye Honor nomination for Outstanding Original Score and an IFTA nomination for Best Original Music. Her film score for The Swing was nominated for Best Original Music at the Festival International du Film d'Aubagne, France. She has received commissions from the RTE National Symphony Orchestra, Irish National Opera, Cork International Film Festival and Union Chapel, London.

Irene has focused on composing live scores for silent films, which include The Passion of Joan of Arc,  The Fall of the House of Usher, and also Nosferatu and Metropolis (both co-composed with Linda Buckley). These have had performances in venues such as Glasgow Cathedral for Glasgow Film Festival, Union Chapel London for Organ Reframed Festival, Brookfield Place, NYC for SilentFilms/LiveMusic Series and Zwinglikirche, Berlin (with Gudrun Gut).

Recent collaborations include The Tower with Jesse Jones and Ritual with Junk Ensemble. Irene holds a PhD in Composition and a BMus from University College Cork and an MA in Music Technology from Queens University Belfast. She attended Composition courses in the USA, Latvia and the Netherlands, alongside Film Scoring courses under Screen Training Ireland.

 "She's an absolutely huge talent. I've been a fan of hers for a couple of years, she's still young for a composer, I think she is going to have a huge career in film music, if she wants that"  - Enda Walsh on Arena RTE Radio 1 Jan 2021.