Date: Thursday 01 October 2026
Time: 16.00 to 17.30
Location: Boydell Recital Room, Top Floor, House 5, Department of Music, Trinity College Dublin.
Admission is free and all welcome.
Abstract
Composer and inaugural Rosemary O’Mahony Fellow Stephanie Martin joins Dr Nicole Grimes, Head of Music at Trinity College Dublin, for a conversation about Echo (2025), Martin’s ten-minute prelude for choir and orchestra, composed as a companion to Johannes Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem. Scored for SATB chorus, SSA echo chorus, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, strings, harp, and timpani, Echo takes as its central text Christina Rossetti’s poem of the same name, interwoven with passages from the Latin Mass for the Dead.
Martin was drawn to Rossetti’s Echo for the simplicity and immediacy with which it addresses dreams, memory, longing, and loss. As she observes, the poem “has very simple language, and it speaks to dreams, and memory, and loss in a very simple way,” while possessing a particular resonance for the twenty-first century, “where we are seeking for things that are beautiful and immediate.”
Taking Echo and its dialogue with Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem as its point of departure, the conversation will explore how a contemporary composer encounters, responds to, and reimagines a canonical nineteenth-century work. It will consider the musical and poetic treatment of memory, consolation, absence, and loss in both works, while opening onto broader questions about these themes in Brahms’s music. The discussion will also situate Echo within a wider landscape of twenty-first-century composition, considering the ways in which contemporary composers continue to engage creatively with Brahms and the musical past.
Bio
Toronto composer Stephanie Martin (Professor Emeritus, York University) is the inaugural O’Mahony Visiting Fellow in Music (2026–27), and a choral conductor and composer whose work exemplifies the vitality of music as a scholarly, creative, and performative discipline. She is an accomplished composer of works for both voices and instruments, Martin’s awards include the York University AMPD research award (2019), the Exultate Chamber Singers’ competition (2009), and the Association of Anglican Musicians competition (2010).
Martin is currently collaborating with Trinity College Dublin’s Department of Music to develop a new choral score drawing on the poetry and experiences of the Irish Canadian diaspora and their migration to Canada during Ireland’s Great Famine (An Gorta Mór). She is interested in seeing how performers and audiences can acquire a deeper understanding of the Irish diaspora in Canada through experiential learning. A Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar of music at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design, Martin is currently composer-in-residence for the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. She directs Schola Magdalena, a women’s ensemble, is conductor emeritus of Pax Christi Chorale, and past director of music at the historic church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Toronto. For more details please visit the Trinity Long Room Hub website here.
For more information about this event or the Trinity Seminar in Musicology Series please email Dr Nicole Grimes at Nicole.Grimes@tcd.ie.