Arts and Culture

School's out early today. It's five to three on a Wednesday afternoon in the National Concert Hall. The RTESO has just finished rehearsing Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." As the wind and percussion players gather together their instruments and prepare to leave, the string players sit patiently waiting to finish the day's work. The last programme piece to be rehearsed, "Divertmento For Strings" by Irish composer Seoirse Bodley, is, as the title would suggest, for string only. By Paddy Agnew

MARTIN GALE'S RURAL PAINTINGS BY AIDAN DUNNE

*Aidan Dunne is art critic for In Dublin magazine

A new genre of humour, more vivid, cynical and even cruel has been slouching onto the Irish stage. By Gene Kerrigan

Timing has a lot to do with whether stand up comedy is good - and tonight the timing is dreadful. Eight, they said, then half past, and nine is long gone and it's half past nine before Billy Magra goes on stage and starts with the humour. The reason for the bad timing was more bad timing - the show was set for Monday night, and that's when Not The Nine O'Clock News is on BBC 2. And a lot of the folks who might go to a gig like this are Not fans.

The Clash of the Ash, by Raymond Smith.  Aherlow Publishers. A Popular History of the National Game 1884-1981.

The microphone takes the sound that the singer is making and feeds it through a lead into a mixing machine. There the sound can be manipulated by the sound engineer's knobs and toggles before being passed on to a reel of tape that is two inches wide. The machine can put up to sixteen individual sound tracks onto the wide tape. There are already several tracks on the tape. Rhythm section - drums, bass, guitar, piano.

When performances of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony were given in England towards the end of the nineteenth century, the final movement, the Ode to Joy, was often accompanied to a rousing finale by four military brass bands. Victorian culture with its bawdy music halls and tawdry ballads was often so far over the top that even the more extravagant Ken Russell might seem tame in comparison. Victorian England was not iust the era of the straight-laced, its culture represented a curious .ble nd of the sentimental and the pompous.

When August Rodin exhibited his first freestanding figure "The Bronze Age" in 1877, it caused a furious controversy. Faced with the precision of its anatomical detail and its uncannily lifelike sense of moveement, many spectators claimed that it was almost certainly cast from a live model. It wasn't. They were simply unprepared for the shock of encounntering the work of the greatest sculpptor since Michelangelo.

In their six years as the National Film Studios of Ireland, Ardmore Studios have proved to be a commercial disaster. Is Ardmore about the development of the Irish film industry or is it merely a "Government Showcase"? By Paddy Agnew

If, like a lot of Irish people, you . thought that the Celts were the earliest inhabitants of Ireland, stand corrected. The earliest recorded inn. habitants of Ireland were the Tuaith De Danann. A simple mistake and one which JimFitzpatrick spends most of his working time and energy trying to rectify. For the last ten years now, Fitzzpatrick has 'been researching and illustratting their history and has produced one volume of that work, called "The Book Or-Conquests". That volume will be folllowed by two others, "The Silver Arm" and "The Son of the Sun".

Nothing much is happening outtside Moran's of the Weir in Clarinbridge but there's an air of exxpectancy. The little stage festooned with Guinness ads looks no match for the rain that is threatening to fall. The odd drinker wanders, pint in hand, out of Moran's to watch Festival Commmittee members anxiously walk to and fro. The action is still in the dark, crowded interior of the pub. By Eamonn O'Dwyer