The Dock proudly presents Ultan O’Brien and Martin Green in partnership with the Music Network.

Ultan O’Brien, who plays both fiddle and viola, will collaborate with accordion player and electronic music-maker Martin Green. Both highly regarded musicians and composers in the fields of folk and traditional music, Ultan and Martin also share an adventurous spirit when it comes to exploring musical boundaries. Their work will bring live traditional acoustic instruments, electronic music and storytelling together to explore the peculiar history and evolution of scordatura. The term, which means alternate tuning on the fiddle, is a unique part of the fiddle playing tradition in Leitrim.

Ultan O’Brien is the recipient of the 2023 RESONATE Musician-in-Residence award which provides support for professional musicians with a strong track record in music performance to develop new collaborations. The residency at The Dock enables the selected musician to devote time to the creation of new work, in addition to a range of in-kind supports along with opportunities to showcase the work through live performances and digital updates.

About the musicians

Ultan O’Brien is a musician and composer hailing from County Clare, based in Leitrim. He is a fiddle and viola player with a background in traditional Irish music and improvised music. He performs as a soloist, in duos with Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin and percussive dancer Nic Gareiss, and with Slow Moving Clouds, Skipper’s Alley, John Francis Flynn, and Neil Ó Loclainn’s Cuar.

In 2020, Ultan and Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin released an album, Solas an Lae, on the Scottish label Watercolour Music which was awarded Best Folk Album at the RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards 2021.

Also in 2020, Ultan was named one of the Contemporary Music Centre’s Emerging Composers and has been commissioned to compose a number of works as a result. In 2022, Ultan was commissioned to create a film and score as part of Ulysses Journey 2022. The film was screened in IFI, Dublin; CCI, Paris; SARC, Belfast and Budapest, Hungary, and at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022.

Martin Green is a multi-award winning musician and Ivor Novello-winning composer. As a member of Lau, he has won four BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards for Best Group an unprecedented four times. In 2015, he was nominated in the Best Musician category. In 2014, he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in recognition of his talent as a composer. In 2019, he won the Ivor Novello award for his sound walk “Aeons” that was part of The Great Exhibition of the North.

Born into a family of traditional music, and trained by Bert Santilly, one of the contemporary accordion world’s most respected teachers, Martin gained a strong grounding in numerous styles and techniques at an early age, including spending time in Hungary with some of the leading lights in Balkan and Gypsy music.

Martin’s career as a composer began in 2003 when he was invited to write music for the goliath environmental theatre piece ‘Albatross’ based on Shackleton's journey and including a 40-foot steel ship and full pyrotechnic show. Albatross was the centrepiece of Glastonbury Festival’s Theatre Field in 2004. Martin formed the multi-award winning experimental folk trio Lau in 2005 with Aidan O'Rourke and Kris Drever. The band play almost entirely self- composed material and have a substantial fan base in the UK and internationally. Lau tours and performs regularly in the UK and abroad.

RESONATE 2023 is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland.