CMC Composer Amanda Feery Recipient of Markievicz Award

CMC Composer Amanda Feery has been announced as one of ten recipients of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media 2023 Markievicz Award.

The award which is administered by the Arts Council on behalf of the Department is designed to support artists to develop their craft and to produce great art that recognises and commemorates the role of women in the historical period 1912-1923. The ten awardees work across disciplines including music, traditional arts, theatre, film, literature and visual arts and will receive grants of up to €25000 per individual or group. 

Composer Amanda Feery said:

I am honoured to receive the Markievicz Award. The award will allow me to develop a work I have been thinking about for a number of years, with an absolute dream group of collaborators.

The Markievicz Award will allow me to develop an hour-long radio work for Dulciana Vocal Ensemble, Lina Andonovska, with a libretto by Eimear Walshe. The piece is a response to Eamon de Valera’s 1943 radio address, ‘On Language and the Irish Nation’ or ‘The Ireland That We Dreamed Of’. The rhetoric of this speech suggests a traditional role for women in ‘cosy homesteads’ that is exclusionary and at odds with not only the 1916 proclamation text itself, but the spirit and forthrightness of the women insurgents who fought for Irish independence. The work will reflect on the gulf of time between the 1916 proclamation, the 1937 constitution, and the 1943 broadcast. In this fissure of time, we see the desires of the
women of 1916, and the continued desire for an emancipatory legislative framework as fought for by them, versus the more conservative legislation since the formation of the state. The focus of the work is to give name to the socio-political desires of women, not only of 1916, but of women across this gulf of time, prompted by themes from De Valera’s speech that are deeply relevant to women, but from where they are excluded.

For more information on the Markievicz Award and a full list of the 2023 recipients, visit: gov.ie

Listen back to Amanda Feery's 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation', which premiered at New Music Dublin 2023, performed by the National Sypmhony Orchestra conducted by David Brophy. Recorded for live broadcast on RTÉ lyric fm.