Major award for LCMS founder
DUNDALK resident Eamonn Quinn is to be presented with €20,000 Belmont Prize for Contemporary Music, awarded by The Forberg-Schneider-Stiftung, on June 22 during the ’Book of Hours‘ Festival taking place in Dundalk that weekend.
Founded in 1997, the Forberg-Schneider-Stiftung honours outstanding achievements in contemporary music and Eamonn is the first Irish recipient of the Belmont Prize which is awarded every two years.
Eamonn and his wife Gemma Murray are the founders of Louth Contemporary Music Society (LCMS), which has organised festivals and concerts featuring top contemporary composers and musicians, as well as commissioning new works and producing CDs.
Having grown up as the youngest of a Newry family of nine, Eamonn lived in Belfast, Galic ia in Spain, and Dublin before settling in Dundalk.
A passionate music lover, he founded LCMS in 2006 with the aim of bringing the best of contemporary music to audiences in Dundalk and later Drogheda, so that local music fans wouldn’t have to travel to Dublin for performances.
Since then he has enticed a mesmerising list of composers and musicians to write music which gets its first performance here, Performers and composers are fascinated by his intellectual freedom and his aversion to compromises – and they yield to his charisma.
They all travel to Dundalk to hear their works performed and premièred: Terry Riley, Garth Knox, Marino Formenti, David Lang, and most recently Salvatore Sciarrino.
The legendary composer and pianist Phillip Glass performed in St Patrick’s Cathedral while the famous Kronos Quartet graced the stage of An Tain Arts Centre, and fans of avant garde compoer and musician John Zorn travelled from Europe to see him perform in a number of Dundalk venues.
Eamonn has made Dundalk a magnet for music-lovers: most of the festival‘s visitors arrive from Dublin, with 30 per cent coming from the local vicinity and increasingly large numbers from abroad. Events which he has organised have been reviewed in the national and international press, raising the town’s profile as a venue for world class music events. 5
Pizza Pizza Records host a Paddy’s Eve gig in the Spirit Store on Friday night with Limerick’s Bleeding Heart Pigeons, local favourites Nix Moon and KELSO, and excellent Pizza Pizza Records DJ’s.