B E N J A M I N D W Y E R
Selected Publications & Releases
| BOOK & RECORDING | Imagines (New Dublin Press, 2015)
Limited edition hardback lithograph book featuring score by Benjamin Dwyer, poetry by Kimberly Campanello and commentary by Jonathan Creasy and Garth Knox. Designed by Rossi McCauley of Distinctive Repetition for New Dublin Press, imagines also includes an audio recording of Garth Knox performing Dwyer’s imagines obesae et aspectui ingratae (solo viola) and Kimberly Campanello reciting poetry.
| BOOK & RECORDING | Imagines (New Dublin Press, 2015)
Limited edition hardback lithograph book featuring score by Benjamin Dwyer, poetry by Kimberly Campanello and commentary by Jonathan Creasy and Garth Knox. Designed by Rossi McCauley of Distinctive Repetition for New Dublin Press, imagines also includes an audio recording of Garth Knox performing Dwyer’s imagines obesae et aspectui ingratae (solo viola) and Kimberly Campanello reciting poetry.
| CD | Barry Guy: The Blue Shroud (Intakt Records, 2016)
Barry Guy’s work The Blue Shroud is a hommage to the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso. Barry Guy fuses contemporary music and Baroque music (Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and J.S. Bach), jazz improvisation and poetry (Kerry Hardie). The Blue Shroud ‘might just be the crowning achievement in the Englishman’s long and varied career” (New York City Jazz Record Magazine).
Guy wrote this for a new international ensemble called The Blue Shroud Band
| BOOK | Different Voices: Irish Music and Music in Ireland (Wolke Verlag, 2014)
See also the dedicated website created by the Contemporary Music Centre of Ireland.
| CD | new music: new ireland, two (Contemporary Music Centre, 2015)
featuring Dwyer's 'Eros' from Umbilical
Barry Guy (double bass), Maya Homburger (Baroque violin), David Adams (harpsichord)
| ESSAY | 'Dios los cría: Barry Guy and Maya Homburger’
in Music & Literature, Vol. 4, 2014
| CD | Mary Dullea, Gothic: New Piano Music from Ireland (Divine Arts Records, 2014)
featuring Dwyer's 'Homenaje a Maurice Ohana'
| ARTICLE | 'Joycean Aesthetics, Ethnic Memory and Mythopoetic Imagination in the Music of Frank Corcoran'
in COLONY, issue 2, 2014
| CD | Scenes from Crow – VOX 21 ensemble (Diatribe Records, 2014)
Composed for amplified mixed ensemble, live electronics and tape, Scenes from Crow (55') is Benjamin Dwyer's response to the Crow poems of Ted Hughes.
'An intense, deeply personal, often enigmatic response to the poems…the scope for diversity [is] very large, and the music travels great distances…To Dwyer's credit, it made you want to become better acquainted with the Crow poems…'
The Irish Times
| BOOK CHAPTER | 'Transformational Ostinati in György Ligeti's Sonatas for Solo Cello and Solo Viola' in György Ligeti: Of Strange Sounds and Foreign Lands (Boydell & Brewer, 2011)
Shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society Prize. Dwyer coins the term 'transformational ostinati' to describe Ligeti's use of automata in the viola and cello sonatas.
| CD | Irish Guitar Works
Benjamin Dwyer and the Callino Quartet (2012)
Benjamin Dwyer Twelve Studies
John Buckley Guitar Sonata No. 1
Benjamin Dwyer Guitar Quintet
'Most composers are virtuosos by proxy…Dwyer understands virtuosity from the inside.'
Kevin O'Connell, Royal Irish Academy of Music
| MONOGRAPH | Constellations: The Life and Music of John Buckley
(Carysfort Press, 2011)
Benjamin Dwyer provides a long overdue assessment of one of Ireland's most prolific composers of the last decades.
Wolfgang Marx
University College, Dublin
| CD | Twelve Études for Guitar
written and performed by
Benjamin Dwyer (2008)
It's always fascinating to hear a composer in his own music, especially when he's as accomplished an instrumentalist as Dwyer, who plays with a charismatic blend of explosive panache and evocative lyricism…
Fanfare Magazine
| CD | Breathe: New Notes for Flute from Ireland & New Zealand
'Crow'
William Dowdall, sliding flute (2010)
...Benjamin Dwyer's 'Crow', inspired by Ted Hughes' poetry, has Dowdall as ringmaster supreme in a ritual of electronic rumble and mysterious chattering recitations.
New Zealand Herald
| CD | Contemporary Music from Ireland, vol. 7
'Al-Andalus' (second and third movements)
VOX21 ensemble (2008)
| CD | Evolution
Mike Nielsen and Benjamin Dwyer, guitars (2005)
Though Nielsen and Dwyer come from seemingly different directions, the music that has resulted from the happy collision seems as pure and natural as the air. The name says it all – this is not some Frankenstein monster, but a newly evolved species, fully formed and beautiful.
Cormac Larkin, Jazz Critic, Irish Times