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The Sunday Service

The Sunday Service: Reflections on Loss

The Sunday Service: Reflections on Loss was a wonderful series of performances and reflections from a wide variety of artists about their personal and societal experiences with grief and loss.

After more than two years in development, audience members were able to witness the World Premiere of Wait, the new work for string quartet composed by Irish contemporary classical composer Ailís Ní Ríain, co-commissioned by Galway Music Residency and Cúirt. 

The piece was conceived in response to a poem – ‘Wait’  by the American poet Galway Kinnell – Ní Ríain created the fascinating and layered aural experience from this inspiration. 

‘Wait’ is a meditation on suicide and loss, and audiences had the opportunity to hear it read by Kinnell in a video recording during the event.  

Following this, writers Michael Pedersen, William Keohane and Jay Bernard guided us through their meditations on grief and loss, and the galaxy of feelings and memories sparked by those explorations.  

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning poet, having produced two highly-acclaimed collections of poetry with Polygon Books, with a prose debut Boy Friends is forthcoming with Faber & Faber in 2022.  

William Keohane is a writer and poet from Limerick. His work has appeared in Banshee, Queering the Green, Hennessy New Irish Writing and the RTÉ Radio 1 Sunday Miscellany. He recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. 

Jay Bernard is a British artist, writer, and poet from Croydon, London. Their multimedia performance work Surge: Side A received the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for new poetry. They co-authored I, a volume of stories, essays, and poems by several writers edited by Sharmilla Beezmohun. 

Ailís Ní Ríain is an Irish composer and writer who aims to produce work that challenges, provokes and engages. Her work has been performed across Europe, in Israel, Brazil, USA and Japan and broadcast on BBC and RTÉ. 

Contempo Quartet has been Galway Music Residency’s Ensemble in Residence since 2003 and was RTÉ’s Resident Quartet from 2014 until 2019.  

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