In this episode, Cal talks about her journey from playing classical piano from sheet music, to arranging verbatim pop operas – and she performs for an audience at the bookshop.
Cal Folger Day used to play classical music on the piano, sticking strictly to the sheet music. “I was terrified to, like, make a noise that wasn’t on a piece of paper first,” she says. “I was just terrified of breaking out of that.”
The Dublin-based American singer, songwriter, and musician has come a long way since then. The change began when she took a course on medieval music. “It made me realise that the whole system was interesting but something that was developed, it wasn’t inevitable or anything,” she says.
Since then, she’s jumped headlong into writing and arranging her own music. On a recent evening, she performed some of it for an audience at Marrowbone Books in The Coombe.
She did a few songs she wrote, one Willie Nelson wrote, and some of her “verbatim music” – including a piece in which the words come from a Facebook Messenger conversation with a friend about her friend’s family’s difficulties.
“I’ve started writing these verbatim pop operas. So taking transcriptions of conversations or interviews and setting them to music and playing them with other people,” she says.
This is the eighteenth episode of Martin Cook’s Music at Marrowbone Books series of podcasts. You can listen to the other episodes here.
The plaza needs help, says Sean Mullan, owner of the Third Space cafe. “Someone with the imagination that we could make this a vibrant space that belongs to the city.”
“It’s coming during this wave when people are bringing trad music into modern spaces. But it came out of pure experimentation,” says musician Ian Nyquist.
And Danny Groenland puts “his activist spirit front and centre”.
“That there’s some acknowledgement of dark things on the edge of the frame, in the moments between the smiles, makes Ross Whitaker’s film” worth a watch.
