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Death of Christopher Nolan, Irish Poet & Author

Christopher Nolan, Irish poet and author, dies of asphyxiation in Dublin on February 20, 2009.

Nolan is born to parents Joseph and Bernadette Nolan in Mullingar, County Westmeath on September 6, 1965. Due to asphyxiation at birth, he is born with permanent impairment of his nerve-signaling system, a condition now labelled dystonia. Because of these complications, he is born with cerebral palsy and can only move his head and eyes. Due to the severity of the cerebral palsy, he uses a wheelchair. In an interview, his father, Joseph, explains how, at the age of 10, he is placed on medication that “relaxed him so he could use a pointer attached to his head to type.” To write, he uses a special computer and keyboard. In order to help him type, his mother holds his head in her cupped hands while he painstakingly picks out each word, letter by letter, with a pointer attached to his forehead.

Nolan communicates with others by moving his eyes, using a signal system. When he is young, his father tells him stories and reads passages from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and D. H. Lawrence to keep his mind stimulated. His mother strings up letters of the alphabet in the kitchen, where she keeps up a stream of conversation. His sister, Yvonne, sings songs and acts out skits. His mother states that “he wrote extensively since the age of 11 and went on to write many poems, short stories and two plays, many of which were published.” Many of the writings are compiled for his first publication, the chapbook Dam-Burst of Dreams.

Upon becoming a teenager, Nolan receives his education from the Central Remedial Clinic School, Mount Temple Comprehensive School and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book is published at the age of fifteen. He is also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in the UK, the medal of excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers, and a Person of the Year award in Ireland. He writes an account of his childhood, Under the Eye of the Clock, published by St. Martin’s Press, which wins him the UK’s Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1987 at the age of 21. He soon drops out of Trinity College to write a novel entitled The Banyan Tree (1999).

Nolan spends more than a decade writing The Banyan Tree. According to The New York Times, the book is a multigenerational story of a dairy-farming family in Nolan’s native county of Westmeath. The story is seen through the eyes of the aging mother. It is inspired, he tells Publishers Weekly, by the image of “an old woman holding up her skirts as she made ready to jump a rut in a field.” A review of the book is done in The New York Times by Meghan O’Rourke. She reviews the book and relates it to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; in the story the protagonist leaves his mother in Ireland while he moves on to travel the world. Nolan, however, gives the reader a version of the mother’s story. “And so, in the end, one suspects that he wants Minnie’s good-natured, commonplace ways to stand as their own achievement, reminding us that life continues in the places left behind.”

At the age of 43, while working on a new novel, Nolan dies in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin at 2:30 a.m. on February 20, 2009. His death is the result of a piece of salmon becoming trapped in his airway. Nothing from the novel he was working on has been released since his death.

Upon hearing the news of Nolan’s death, President of Ireland Mary McAleese says, “Christopher Nolan was a gifted writer who attained deserved success and acclaim throughout the world for his work, his achievements all the more remarkable given his daily battle with cerebral palsy.”


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Death of Musicologist Francis Llewellyn Harrison

Francis Llewellyn Harrison, better known as “Frank Harrison” or “Frank Ll. Harrison” and one of the leading musicologists of his time and a pioneering ethnomusicologist, dies in Canterbury, England, on December 29, 1987.

Initially trained as an organist and composer, he turns to musicology in the early 1950s, first specialising in English and Irish music of the Middle Ages and increasingly turning to ethnomusicological subjects in the course of his career. His Music in Medieval Britain (1958) is still a standard work on the subject, and Time, Place and Music (1973) is a key textbook on ethnomusicology.

Harrison is born in Dublin on September 29, 1905, the second son of Alfred Francis Harrison and Florence May (née Nash). He becomes a chorister at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin in 1912 and is educated at the cathedral grammar school and Mountjoy School. A competent organist, he is deputy organist at St. Patrick’s from 1925 to 1928. In 1920, he also begins musical studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he studies with John Francis Larchet (composition), George Hewson (organ) and Michele Esposito (piano). In 1926, he graduates Bachelor of Music at Trinity College Dublin and is awarded a doctorate (MusD) in 1929 for a musical setting of Psalm 19. He then works in Kilkenny for one year, serving as organist at St. Canice’s Cathedral and music teacher at Kilkenny College.

In 1930, Harrison emigrates to Canada to become organist at Westminster Presbyterian Church in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. In 1933, he studies briefly with Marcel Dupré in France but returns to Canada in 1934 to become organist at Knox Presbyterian Church in Ottawa. In 1935, he takes a position as organist and choirmaster at St. George’s Cathedral in Kingston, Ontario, as well as taking up the newly created post of “resident musician” at Queen’s University at Kingston. His duties include giving lectures, running a choir and an orchestra, and conducting concerts himself. His course in the history and appreciation of music is the first music course to be given for full credit at Queen’s. He resigns from St. George’s in 1941 to become assistant professor of music at Queen’s in 1942. During his years in Canada he still pursues the idea of remaining a performing musician and composer, winning three national composition competitions: for Winter’s Poem (1931), Baroque Suite (1943) and Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon (1945).

On a year’s leave of absence from Queen’s, Harrison studies composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale University, also taking courses in musicology with Leo Schrade. In 1946, he takes up a position at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, and then moves on to Washington University in St. Louis as head of the new Department of Music (1947–1950).

In 1951, Harrison takes the degrees of Master of Arts (M.A.) and Doctor of Music (DMus) at Jesus College, Oxford, and becomes lecturer (1952), senior lecturer (1956), and reader in the history of music (1962–1970) there. In 1965, he is elected Fellow the British Academy and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford. From 1970 to 1980, he is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, retiring to part-time teaching in 1976.

Harrison also holds Visiting Professorships in musicology at Yale University (1958–1959), Princeton University (spring 1961 and 1968–1969), and Dartmouth College (winter 1968 and spring 1972). He also briefly returns to Queen’s University at Kingston as Queen’s Quest Visiting Professor in the fall of 1980 and is Visiting Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh for the calendar year 1981.

Harrison’s honorary titles also include Doctor of Laws at Queen’s University, Kingston (1974), Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society (1981), and Vice President and Chairman of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society (1985). At Queen’s also, the new Harrison-LeCaine Hall (1974) is partly named in his honour.

Harrison dies in Canterbury, England on December 29, 1987.

In 1989, Harry White appreciates Harrison as “an Irish musicologist of international standing and of seminal influence, whose scholarly achievement, astonishingly, encompassed virtually the complete scope of the discipline which he espoused.” David F. L. Chadd writes of him “He was above all things an explorer, tirelessly curious and boyishly delighted in the pursuit of knowledge, experience and ideas, and totally heedless of artificially imposed constraints and boundaries.”

Since 2004, the Society for Musicology in Ireland (SMI) awards a bi-annual Irish Research Council Harrison Medal in his honour to distinguished international musicologists.


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Birth of Christopher Nolan, Irish Poet & Author

Christopher Nolan, Irish poet and author, is born to parents Joseph and Bernadette Nolan in Mullingar, County Westmeath on September 6, 1965.

Due to asphyxiation at birth, Nolan is born with permanent impairment of his nerve-signaling system, a condition now labelled dystonia. Because of these complications, Nolan is born with cerebral palsy and can only move his head and eyes. Due to the severity of the cerebral palsy, he uses a wheelchair. In an interview, his father, Joseph, explains how, at the age of 10, he is placed on medication that “relaxed him so he could use a pointer attached to his head to type.” To write, Nolan uses a special computer and keyboard. In order to help him type, his mother holds his head in her cupped hands while Christopher painstakingly picks out each word, letter by letter, with a pointer attached to his forehead.

He communicates with others by moving his eyes, using a signal system. When he is young, his father tells him stories and reads passages from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and D.H. Lawrence to keep his mind stimulated. His mother strings up letters of the alphabet in the kitchen, where she keeps up a stream of conversation. His sister, Yvonne, sings songs and acts out skits. His mother stated that “he wrote extensively since the age of 11 and went on to write many poems, short stories and two plays, many of which were published.” Many of the writings are compiled for his first publication, the chapbook Dam-Burst of Dreams.

Upon becoming a teenager, Nolan receives his education from the Central Remedial Clinic School, Mount Temple Comprehensive School and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book is published at the age of fifteen. He is also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in the U.K., the medal of excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers, and a Person of the Year award in Ireland. He writes an account of his childhood, Under the Eye of the Clock, published by St. Martin’s Press, which wins him the U.K.’s Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1987 at the age of 21. He soon drops out of Trinity College to write a novel entitled The Banyan Tree (1999).

Nolan spends more than a decade writing The Banyan Tree. According to The New York Times, the book is a multigenerational story of a dairy-farming family in Nolan’s native county of Westmeath. The story is seen through the eyes of the aging mother. It is inspired, he tells Publishers Weekly, by the image of “an old woman holding up her skirts as she made ready to jump a rut in a field.” A review of the book is done in The New York Times by Meghan O’Rourke. She reviews the book and relates it to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; in the story the protagonist leaves his mother in Ireland while he moves on to travel the world. Nolan, however, gives the reader a version of the mother’s story. “And so, in the end, one suspects that he wants Minnie’s good-natured, commonplace ways to stand as their own achievement, reminding us that life continues in the places left behind.”

At the age of 43, while working on a new novel, Christopher Nolan dies in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin at 2:30 AM on February 20, 2009. His death is the result of a piece of salmon becoming trapped in his airway. However, nothing from the novel he was working on has been released since his death.

Upon hearing the news of Nolan’s death, President of Ireland Mary McAleese says, “Christopher Nolan was a gifted writer who attained deserved success and acclaim throughout the world for his work, his achievements all the more remarkable given his daily battle with cerebral palsy.”


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Birth of U2 Bassist Adam Clayton

adam-clayton

Adam Charles Clayton, Irish musician best known as the bass guitarist of the rock band U2, is born in Chinnor, Oxfordshire, England, on March 13, 1960.

Clayton is the oldest child of Brian and Jo Clayton. His father is a pilot with the Royal Air Force, who moves into civil aviation, and his mother is a former airline flight attendant. When he is 4 years old his father works in Kenya as a pilot with East African Airways. Clayton regards this as the happiest period of his childhood. In 1965 the family moves to Malahide, County Dublin, where Clayton’s brother Sebastian is born. The Clayton family becomes friends with the Evans family, including their son, David, who later becomes a fellow U2 band-member with Clayton.

When he is eight years old Clayton is sent to the private junior boarding Castle Park School in Dalkey, Dublin, which he did not enjoy because he is not particularly sports orientated. At age 13 he enters the private St. Columba’s College secondary school in Rathfarnham, Dublin. Here he makes friends with other pupils who are enthusiastic about pop/rock music. It is here in the school band where Clayton plays the bass guitar for the first time.

Clayton later changes school to Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin, where he meets future bandmates, Paul Hewson (aka “Bono“) and Larry Mullen Jr., and is reunited with his childhood friend David Evans (aka “The Edge”). In September 1976, Mullen puts an advert onto the school’s bulletin board seeking other musicians to form a band. The original band is a five-piece band known as “Feedback,” consisting of Bono, The Edge, Mullen, Dik Evans, and Clayton. The name is subsequently changed to “The Hype,” but changes to “U2” soon after Dik Evans leaves the band. Clayton stands in as the nearest thing that the band has to a manager in its early life, handing over the duties to Paul McGuinness in May 1978.

In 1981, around the time of U2’s second, spiritually charged October album, a rift is created in the band between Clayton and McGuinness, and the three other band members. Bono, The Edge, and Mullen have joined a Christian group, and are questioning the compatibility of rock music with their spirituality. However, Clayton, with his more ambiguous religious views, is less concerned, and so is more of an outsider, until Bono’s wedding to Alison Hewson (née Stewart), in which Clayton is the best man.

Clayton makes international headlines in August 1989 when he is arrested in Dublin for carrying a small amount of marijuana. He avoids conviction by making a large donation to charity. Clayton also has alcohol problems, which come to a head on November 26, 1993, when he is so hung over that he is unable to play that night’s show in Sydney, the dress rehearsal for their Zoo TV concert film. Bass duties are fulfilled by Clayton’s technician Stuart Morgan. After that incident, however, Clayton gives up alcohol.

In 1995, after the Zoo TV Tour and Zooropa album, Clayton heads to New York City with bandmate Mullen to receive formal training in the bass as until then Clayton has been entirely self-taught. Bono says of Clayton’s early bass playing, “Adam used to pretend he could play bass. He came round and started using words like ‘action’ and ‘fret’ and he had us baffled. He had the only amplifier, so we never argued with him. We thought this guy must be a musician; he knows what he’s talking about. And then one day, we discovered he wasn’t playing the right notes. That’s what’s wrong, y’know?”

In 2011 Clayton becomes an ambassador for the Dublin-based St. Patrick’s Hospital‘s Mental Health Service “Walk in My Shoes” facility.

Clayton and U2 have won numerous awards in their career, including 22 Grammy Awards, including seven times for Best Rock Duo or Group, and twice each for Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Rock Album.


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Christopher Nolan Wins Whitbread Book Award

christopher-nolan

Christopher Nolan, Irish poet and author who cannot move or speak because of an accident at birth, wins the Whitbread Book Award on January 19, 1987, for his autobiography Under the Eye of the Clock.

Nolan is born in Mullingar, County Westmeath, on September 6, 1965, the son of Joseph and Bernadette Nolan. Due to asphyxiation at birth, he is born with permanent impairment of his “nerve-signaling system, a condition he said is now labelled dystonia.” Because of these complications, he is born with cerebral palsy and can only move his head and eyes. To write, Nolan uses a special computer and keyboard. In order to help him type, his mother holds his head in her cupped hands while he painstakingly picks out each word, letter by letter, with a pointer attached to his forehead.

Upon becoming a teenager, Nolan receives his education from the Central Remedial Clinic school, Mount Temple Comprehensive School, and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book is published when he is fifteen. He is also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in the UK, the medal of excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers, and a Person of the Year award in Ireland. At the age of fifteen, he publishes his collection of poems titled Dam-Burst of Dreams. He writes an account of his childhood, Under the Eye of the Clock, published by St. Martin’s Press, which wins him the UK’s Whitbread Book Award in 1987 at the age of 21. He soon drops out of Trinity College to write a novel entitled The Banyan Tree (1999).

Nolan spends more than a decade writing The Banyan Tree. According to The New York Times, the book is a multigenerational story of a dairy-farming family in Nolan’s native county of Westmeath. The story is seen through the eyes of the aging mother. It is inspired, he tells Publishers Weekly, by the image of “an old woman holding up her skirts as she made ready to jump a rut in a field.” A review of the book is done in The New York Times by Meghan O’Rourke. She reviews the book and relates it to James Joyce‘s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; in the story the protagonist leaves his mother in Ireland while he moves on to travel the world. Nolan, however, gives the reader a version of the mother’s story. “And so, in the end, one suspects that he wants Minnie’s good-natured, commonplace ways to stand as their own achievement, reminding us that life continues in the places left behind.”

Christopher Nolan dies at age 43 in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin at 2:30 AM on February 20, 2009, after a piece of salmon becomes trapped in his airway. Irish president Mary McAleese, upon hearing the news, says, “Christopher Nolan was a gifted writer who attained deserved success and acclaim throughout the world for his work, his achievements all the more remarkable given his daily battle with cerebral palsy.”


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Birth of U2’s The Edge, David Howell Evans

the-edge

David Howell Evans, British-born Irish musician and songwriter best known by his stage name The Edge and as the lead guitarist, keyboardist, and backing vocalist of the rock band U2, is born at the Maternity Hospital in Barking, Essex, England on August 8, 1961. A member of U2 since its inception, he has recorded 13 studio albums with the band as well as one solo record.

The Edge is raised in Ireland after the Evans family relocates there while he is still an infant. He receives his initial formal education at St. Andrew’s National School in Dublin. As a child he also receives piano and guitar lessons, and practises music with his elder brother Richard. In 1976, at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, he goes to a meeting in response to an advert posted by another pupil, Larry Mullen Jr., on the school’s noticeboard seeking musicians to form a new band with him. Among the other pupils who respond to the note are Paul Hewson (Bono) and Adam Clayton. The band goes through a number of versions before becoming known as U2 in March 1978.

U2 begins its public performance life in small venues in Dublin, occasionally playing at other venues elsewhere in Ireland. In December 1979 they perform their first concerts outside Ireland, in London, and in 1980 begin extensive touring across the British Isles. Their debut album Boy is released in 1980.

In 1981, leading up to the October Tour, Evans comes very close to leaving U2 for religious reasons, but he decides to stay. During this period, he becomes involved with a group called Shalom Tigers, in which bandmates Bono and Larry Mullen Jr. are also involved. Shortly after deciding to remain with the band, he writes a piece of music that later becomes Sunday Bloody Sunday.

U2 eventually becomes one of the most popular acts in popular music, with successful albums such as 1987’s The Joshua Tree and 1991’s Achtung Baby. Over the years, the Edge has experimented with various guitar effects and introduced influences from several genres of music into his own style, including American roots music, industrial music, and alternative rock. With U2, the Edge also plays keyboards, co-produced their 1993 record Zooropa, and occasionally contributes lyrics.

In addition to his regular role within U2, The Edge has also recorded with such artists as Johnny Cash, B. B. King, Tina Turner, Ronnie Wood, Jah Wobble, Holger Czukay, Jay-Z, and Rihanna. He has collaborated with U2 bandmate Bono on several projects, including the soundtracks to the musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and the Royal Shakespeare Company‘s London stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange.

The Edge, Bob Ezrin, and Henry Juszkiewicz co-found Music Rising in 2005, a charity that helps provide replacement instruments for those that were lost in Hurricane Katrina. The instruments are originally only replaced for professional musicians, but they soon realise the community churches and schools need instruments as well. The charity’s slogan is “Rebuilding the Gulf Region note by note” and has helped over a hundred musicians who were affected by the hurricane. The Edge also serves on the board of The Angiogenesis Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation dedicated to improving global health by advancing angiogenesis-based medicine, diets, and lifestyle.

In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine places him at number 38 on its list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” In 2012, Spin ranks him 13th on their own list.


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Birth of Paul David Hewson, U2’s Bono

paul-hewson

Paul David Hewson, Irish singer-songwriter, musician, venture capitalist, businessman, and philanthropist known by his stage name Bono, is born in the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin, on May 10, 1960.

Bono, best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band U2, is raised in Dublin and attends Mount Temple Comprehensive School where he meets his future wife, Alison Stewart, as well as his future U2 bandmates – David “The Edge” Evans, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen, Jr.

Bono writes almost all U2 lyrics, frequently using religious, social, and political themes. During U2’s early years, his lyrics contribute to their rebellious and spiritual tone. As the band matures, his lyrics become inspired more by personal experiences shared with the other members. Bono wins numerous awards with U2, including twenty-two Grammy Awards and the 2003 Golden Globe Award for best original song, “The Hands That Built America,” for the film Gangs of New York.

In 2005, the U2 band members are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility. In November 2008, Rolling Stone magazine ranks Bono as the 32nd-greatest singer of all time.

In 1992, Bono, along with The Edge, purchase and refurbish Dublin’s two-star 70-bedroom Clarence Hotel, converting it into a five-star 49-bedroom hotel.

Bono is on the board of Elevation Partners, a private equity firm, which attempts to purchase Eidos Interactive in 2005 and has since gone on to invest in other entertainment businesses. Bono invests in the Forbes Media group in the United States through Elevation Partners. Elevation Partners becomes the first outsider to invest in the company, taking a minority stake in Forbes Media LLC, a new company encompassing the 89-year-old business which includes Forbes magazine, the Forbes.com website and other assets. The terms of the deal are not disclosed, but reports say the stake is worth about $250 million. The firm also owns a 1.5 percent stake in the social networking site Facebook, originally purchased for $210 million.

Bono is also widely known for his activism concerning Africa, for which he co-founds DATA, EDUN, the ONE Campaign and Product Red. He organises and plays in several benefit concerts and meets with influential politicians. Over the years, Bono is praised and criticised for his activism and involvement with U2.

In 2007, Bono is named in the UK‘s New Year Honours list as an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. On March 29, 2007, he is formally granted knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom for “his services to the music industry and for his humanitarian work.” He is also made a Commandeur of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters). Together with Bill and Melinda Gates, Bono is named Time Person of the Year in 2005, among other awards and nominations.