Aylish E. Kerrigan.

Composer John Buckley will launch mezzo soprano Aylish E. Kerrigan’s book on Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 15, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten in Context: The Singer’s Perspective, at the tenth annual conference of the Society of Musicology in Ireland at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) on 15 June.

The book emerged out of Kerrigan’s PhD research with Prof. Eibhlis Farrell at DkIT, where Kerrigan was the first singer in Ireland to receive a doctorate, in 2009. Published by Peter Lang, the book is a monograph on Schoenberg’s piece, which is a song cycle based on poems of Stefan George and is famous for containing one of the first conscious uses of atonality in Western notated music, from the perspective of the singer, examining documentary sources, changing performance practice, vocal pedagogy, and so on in the building up its investigation of Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. 

Kerrigan is a Chu Tian Scholar at Wuhan Conservatory of Music in China, where she has established the country’s first library of Irish music.

For more information on the book see peterlang.de.

aylishkerrigan.eu