Teddy Abrams — the Grammy Award-Winning composer, conductor, and music director of the Louisville Orchestra — has received a new podium with a unique design. The one-of-a-kind podium and conductor’s rail was created by Irish designer Joseph Walsh.
Walsh is maker whose body of work includes monumental scale sculptures as well as one-of-a-kind, site-specific pieces like the Louisville Orchestra’s new podium and conductor’s rail. His work reflects “a sympathetic use of materials and an expressive engagement with form.”
In a series of posts on Instagram, Walsh describes Abrams as a conductor who is “full of energy, and tries to reach each person in the orchestra.” This gave him the idea to create a rail that would swipe around Abrams “to hold him but also capture the movement, as it is tracing the movement of the baton.”
Walsh says the challenge of making the piece did not revolve around the crafting of the objects themselves, but on how relevant the design would be in the orchestra. “We were adding this new, very contemporary piece into an ensemble of instruments that have existed for centuries.”
The piece is truly unique, made with white ash on an ebonised base. The ebonising process darkens wood to create the appearance of ebony, as seen in many pianos. Abrams says the pieces “lives and breathes with the same fluidity as a conductor and with the same energy of live music. Joseph’s insight into the physicality of music-making is manifest in his brilliant and beautiful work.”
The conductor’s rail was revealed to the public in September during Making In 2023, annual seminar hosted by Walsh in Fartha, a small townland in south County Cork, Ireland. The theme of the 2023 seminar was “concert,” and the topics involved “the concerted and collaborative effort of making across craft, art, design and architecture as well as the shared human side of making and its relationship with performance.”
The podium and were unveiled in Louisville on April 18 at a gala celebrating Abrams’s tenth anniversary with the orchestra. The concert featured a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Walsh himself was in attendance.
This article appears in May 22 – Jun 4, 2024.
