Something For The Weekend: Sarah Davachi's cultural picks

RTÉ News​

21-05-2025

is a Canadian composer and performer of electroacoustic and minimalist music; her acclaimed work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation.
Her new composition Song of the Smile's Fig. was commissioned by Eamonn Quinn of Louth Contemporary Music Society, and will be performed by Chamber Choir Ireland at Louth Contemporary Music Society's Echoes Festival on Saturday 14th June.
We asked Sarah for her choice cultural picks...
FILM
My all-time favourite film is Barry Lyndon, every aspect of it – the production, the cinematography, the pathos of the story, the pacing, the music, the costumes – is perfect and I have a thing for slow period epics. It's the kind of film that I would love to score. I also really love the films of Abbas Kiarostami, especially Taste of Cherry and Certified Copy, the way he plays with perspective and narrative has really challenged my thinking and leaves me deeply moved by the films even years later. I've never seen anything like the end of Taste of Cherry, it gave me chills. More recently, I'll give a shout-out to Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy, who made Oddity and Caveat, which are some of the best horror films I've seen recently.
BOOK
I'm just finishing a doctoral degree in musicology and I'm still in that headspace, so most of what I read these days is theoretical non-fiction. I look forward to the time when I can return to fiction and really get indulgent with it. Lately I've been going through this two-volume exploration of the compositions and writings of James Tenney, who was an incredible American composer that I think has been greatly overlooked. The books, called The Music of James Tenney, are by Robert Wannamaker, who also has a new book on Tenney's music (called Writings and Interviews on Experimental Music) coming out in June, which is very exciting. In terms of fiction, one of my favourites is Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, it's so beautifully melancholy. I also love reading longer collections of poetry – my favourites are by Rainer Maria Rilke (especially his Sonnets to Orpheus), André Breton, and Richard Brautigan.
MUSIC
Where to begin? I study and listen to a lot of 'early' music, and recently I've been returning to the work of William Byrd, a renaissance composer who wrote quite a lot of choral music as well as some very beautiful works for keyboard. Listening to early music tends to be as much about the composers as it is about the performers, and different ensembles that interpret the same repertoire can vary greatly in their approaches. I've been returning lately to Noah Greenberg's New York Pro Musica, they've always sounded very straightforward to me, like they embody exactly what you'd imagine when you think of early music and they have this kind of wintry east coast academic vibe that I'm into, so I've really been enjoying going there mentally lately.
I also love listening to the Huelgas Ensemble, a group from Belgium that's been around since the 1970s; on the other side of that coin, they often feel very experimental to me in their interpretations, partly in their choice of instrumentation and in the acoustic orientation of the players. There are a lot of contemporary experimental musicians who engage with early music in really meaningful ways (I like to think of myself as belonging to this group of people, if I may say so!), and a few of my favourites right now are Mara Winter, an American composer and flautist based in Switzerland, and Clara Levy, a French composer and violinist based in Belgium. If you follow my monthly radio show on NTS, you'll know that I'm also a huge fan of progressive rock music from the 1970s especially. I've been heavily into South American prog (I contend that the best prog came from Argentina) but lately I've been getting back into Italian prog a bit more, bands like Picchio dal Pozzo, Le Orme, and Latte e Miele.
THEATRE
I actually don't attend the theatre, and I can't say that I've read many plays outside of the usual suspects that you'd read in university literature courses. Los Angeles is of course better known for its film and television production and I've never lived somewhere that had a strong theatre scene, so it's never been something that I've felt was missing in my life. It clearly wasn't enough to get me into reading plays, but I do remember being very taken by the work of Harold Pinter, which I had to read for a philosophy course I was taking on existentialism. The thematic content is of course interesting, but I was also intrigued by his writing style, which is almost minimalist in its emphasis on negative space by way of silence and pauses.
TV
My husband and I started watching the Dekalog earlier this year as I'd never seen it before and he's a big fan of the filmmaker. It's a Polish television miniseries made by Krzysztof Kieslowski in the late 1980s, each episode articulating one of the ten commandments in the modern context of people who all live in the same social housing project in Warsaw. There's one episode that I just couldn't deal with (episode 4... there's no moral dilemma to be had, it's just wrong either way) but the rest of the series is really well done. In terms of more modern/mainstream television, I was a big fan of the Ripley miniseries with Andrew Scott in the titular role. It was gorgeously shot, wonderfully acted, beautiful sound design, and the pacing is just incredible.
GIG
I regrettably also don't attend as much live music as I should or would like to – I'm a bit of a homebody and Los Angeles is also very conducive to that kind of lifestyle, for better or for worse. Most of the concerts that I take in happen while I'm on tour, which I do quite a lot, alongside other things that are happening at the concerts or festivals that I play. Most recently two performances that left a lasting impression on me were a collaborative commission by Ed Atkins and Chris Shields, which I heard at the Organ Sound Art Festival in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2024, and a presentation of Éliane Radigue's Occam Ocean for orchestra, performed by Onceim as part of Festival Musica in Strasbourg, France in September 2024. Those kinds of works hit completely differently when they're resonating in a large, acoustic space as opposed to a recording.
ART
Similar to the music I described above, I find that most works of art just impact you in a completely different way when you see them in person. A few years ago I was giving a concert in Madrid and I had a few days off there so I went to the Museo del Prado as I'd never been. I didn't realize that they had Francisco Goya's Black Paintings series there, so I just stumbled onto it by accident and was really overwhelmed. I think part of it is knowing that they weren't created for public consumption, so there's a desperation and a sadness about them that feels really vulnerable, especially in comparison to the public works that he is known for. He simply painted these directly onto the walls of the house he was living in and that gives them a much darker feel, both visually but also psychologically. El Perro (The Dog) especially, something about seeing it in person made me want to vomit, it just felt so tragic and lonely.
RADIO/PODCAST
I actually don't really listen to a lot of podcasts for whatever reason. If I'm not listening to music, I tend to just prefer silence. And sometimes listening to people talk lulls me to sleep, which is obviously not good when you live in a city that requires driving on a constant basis. I occasionally listen to episodes of Marc Maron's WTF podcast – his interview style used to really bother me because he frequently interrupts people, but I've grown to embrace it and I think he conducts pretty honest and unusual discussions, which I appreciate.
TECH
I don't know that I have a great answer for this question. On a personal level, I adore geography games/apps, like this one, where you identify all kinds of maps, both current and historical, geopolitical and topographical. I love that kind of stuff and am always looking for similar games that challenge your memory in different ways. On a professional level, I suppose the main "tech" that I use these days is for sorting out tuning systems. There's an online tool built by the German theorist and composer Caspar Johannes Walter that I use quite a lot, he has a lot of amazing resources on his website, and I also use the Hayward Tuning Vine, which is an incredible lattice-based interface designed by Robin Hayward, a British musician and composer based in Berlin, also notable for developing the microtonal tuba mechanism. On my phone, I use the iStroboSoft app for in situ tuning – it's modelled after the old Peterson strobe tuners and it's great, it allows you to do a lot of tuning modifications and achieve a level of specificity that most generic tuners struggle with.
THE NEXT BIG THING...
I can't think of an answer that isn't pessimistic and sardonic in light of the current state of the world, so I will leave it at that for fear of sounding too negative. Perhaps just enjoying whatever you can in life, I guess – that's really important and I think it's also severely underrated. Life is short, take whatever meaning you can, whenever and wherever you can get it.