ISSUE Project Room presents Irish composer/performer/musician Áine O’Dwyer in a live improvisatory performance for pipe organ at the First Unitarian Church in Brooklyn Heights. As a young teenager, O’Dwyer was schooled in a Catholic convent, where she requested her music teacher Sr. Cecilia to teach her to play the pipe organ. As it turned out, she was refused. Though a disappointment at the time, years later the experience inspired her to freely explore the parameters of the instrument.
Primarily a harpist, In 2011 O'Dwyer was given access to the pipe organ in St Mark’s Church, Islington, for several months while the cleaners were at work— a rare opportunity to grapple with the "king of instruments" and apply her sense of melodic, structured improvisation to a new context. The result was her much celebrated release, "Music For Church Cleaners vol. I and II", a series of solo improvisations that qualify simultaneously as a live recording, site-specific performance art with a Cagean mindset, and field recording.
Áine O’Dwyer is an Irish composer, and performer based in London. Her notable solo releases include “Anything Bright Or Startling?” (Second Language, 2013), and “Music For Church Cleaners vol. I and II“ (MIE, 2015). Ongoing recording projects and residencies include the Brunel Tunnel shaft, London and the Franciscan Friary, Limerick city, Ireland. She has performed widely as a solo artist and in collaboration with Mark Fry and the A-Lords, United Bible studies, Visitant (Trevor Knight, Gyohei Zaitsu, and Alice Maher), and Charlemagne Palestine, Cafe Oto, London. Recent solo performances for both harp and pipe organ include Tusk Festival, Newcastle, UK, Full Of Noises Festival, Barrow in Furness and "sound is sound is sound", London.
