Our Project!
We are Ilse de Ziah, cellist from Ireland, and Maarten Roos, filmmaker from Portugal. This is our project for a series of exclusive high quality music documentaries called Living the Tradition, which will follow Ilse around Ireland searching for the origins of ten Irish Airs.
Music unites us, speaks to our common humanity and brings us together in a shared experience whatever our cultural background. Therefore, traditional music needs to be kept alive in the cultures from which it springs. It is a trend observed around the world in the modern era that traditional music can be deemed irrelevant or forgotten. It is important that the music is celebrated, explored and promoted and that artists add to the tradition to keep it alive.
Ilse works at Living the Tradition by finding Irish airs, arranging them for the cello, recording them and making them available for other people to listen to and to play. She has published a book of ten of her arrangements, “Irish Airs for Solo Cello”, which includes background information on each of them. The histories of these melodies are rich with references to specific places, people and stories. When Maarten, who is fond of Irish music, found out about these, he immediately thought they would make great short films.
What we want to do is to create a series of short music-documentaries based on Ilse’s work. During each short film (between 5 and 10 minutes long), Ilse will perform an Irish Air on the cello and explain the background of the melody. Each piece will be filmed in the area in Ireland related to its story, following Ilse on her quest for finding out more about the history and origin. Short interviews with other people will be included if the music's story demands it. The ten documentaries will also be put together to create a full one hour film. In addition, in the process of filming, Maarten will record material to create a beautiful wordless film of Irish landscapes accompanied by the Airs.
The final films will be made available online as Video on Demand, as well as in the form of an exclusive DVD and are expected to be ready in the Autumn of 2013.
What We Need & What You Get
We are looking for 7000 Euros to make this first project happen. This will go to:
- Travel and accommodation costs: 2300 Euros. We need to film at ten locations across Ireland.
- Design of artwork (DVD): 250 Euros.
- Overhead for Indiegogo: 450 Euros.
- Working hours of Ilse and Maarten, 2000 + 2000 Euros. This project will take at least an equivalent full time month of our time for each of us.
If we do not meet our goal, we will pursue the project anyway, and work with what we have. Depending on the amount achieved, we might have to do a smaller number of films, but at least that will help us further for sure!
Contributions will be honoured with: free download of the album Irish Airs for Solo Cello, by Ilse, the corresponding eBook with sheet music and background information, 3-month access to the final films, your name in the credits. In addition, if you contribute 50 Euros or more, you will receive free download of the final films for you to enjoy at any time and an exclusive 6-month Video-on-Demand access to a documentary by Maarten. If you contribute with 100 Euros or more, we will send you the exclusive DVD, as well as the CD and book version of Irish Airs for Solo Cello. For more details, see the perk descriptions on the right side of the page.
If you can't contribute financially, but if you think our project is worthwhile, please do pass on the word to others you know who might be interested! We thank you for it!
The Impact and Beyond
By contributing to this project, you are helping to conserve and promote traditional Irish folk music, a treasure of our culture.
In some way we are doing a bit what Belá Bártok did in the early 20th century with traditional folk music from eastern Europe and Algeria: by putting these melodies in a different form, he managed to conserve them for the future.
With this project realised we can expand our scope with new projects and also run for other funds. Funding agencies and institutions normally want to see what they buy into and this project will allow us to have excellent concrete material to show.
Finally, we want to bring the results out to the open, by organising screenings and performings.
About us
You might ask, can we actually do this project? Well, here is some background information about us and we let you decide!
Ilse de Ziah is a cellist, arranger and composer. She performs solo cello concerts, taking inspiration from the Irish and other landscapes to create a fresh, lyrical and emotional style of cello music. Ilse is principal cellist of the City of Cork Symphony Orchestra, and has been involved in theatre, folk music, free improvisation, and dance. She composes music for dance and film, does many recording sessions, and arranges strings for singers and other musicians. Her ensembles include contemporary Australian ensemble Ozmosis, the experimental Quiet Music Ensemble and her classical Scarlet String Quartet. She also plays Baroque Cello. FInd out more on Ilse's website at www.ilsedeziah.com.
Maarten Roos is an all-round documentary filmmaker and planetary scientist. He is also an amateur musician, playing the piano, a beginner on the cello, and he loves music in general and Irish music in particular. Maarten has been been making documentaries about science and technology for clients such as Discovery Channel Canada, the European Space Agency and the Paris Observatory, about human interest issues for organisations such as the Dutch Lung Cancer Information Center and about film, music and art. He holds two TV broadcast credits: the documentary Between Mars and Svalbard commissioned by Portuguese National TV channel RTP2 (2012) and Spiral Galaxy, the Milky Way unravelled, broadcast on Dutch TV channel Holland Doc (2009). Take a look at selection of his work at www.vimeo.com/channels/lightcurvefilms.
Pedro Daniel is a graphic/web designer from Portugal, with an experience of over 15 years. Working as a freelancer since 2001, he has worked for a wide range of clients, from Pharmaceutical companies to Musicians, Health Clubs, Law Firms, and more. In this project, he will be looking after the design of all the graphical art work. See his website at pedrodanieldesign.com.
