The festival of St. Patrick was celebrated last week, and with it a reflection of what it is to be Irish on a global scale. A time to view ourselves through the eyes of others. As the global experiment in greening the planet expands, our thoughts turn inwards, because this very cultural identity has been under siege now for more than a year. The essence of what it means to be Irish has been appropriated by the pandemic and may yet be its single biggest victim.

Our position as a cultural nation has always been one of immense authority. Far bigger than our diminutive size would infer. We have a poetic tradition which is one of the oldest recorded on the planet. The Song of Amergin a testimony to the place the arts have traditional held in our hearts. The words of Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and Heaney echo in the great halls of the world where the ‘word’ holds significance and bears testament to the fact that we have always sought to frame our world in the poetic. Our visual artists who hold a mirror for us to gaze upon ourselves and encapsulate our love of place. The works of Le Broquy, Jellet, Yeats, Orpen, Bourke and Keating all sing of an imagined world of light and half-light where we play and become other. Our playwrights,  Dancers, Novelists, all contributing to the daily conversation. Our beautiful music now a global language in itself bears witness to our heritage in every corner of the world.

We have worn well the image of Saints and Scholars bestowed upon us in earlier times but have now mutated into a land of dreamers and visionaries. There is nowhere else that the artist is so formative a part of the community. In a city with no cultural infrastructure, no Significant Art Gallery, no Proper Concert Hall for our music in an acoustic setting, no Appropriate setting for Dance, no School of Music, and, crucially, no plans to develop any of those things, Europe was brought to believe in the worth of the community of Galway. Not because of any persuasive powers of the administrators tasked with winning the bid, but because it was the truth.

And now in the time of Covid, this very community has taken such a severe beating that when the dust settles on Covid the harsh reality will slowly dawn. In such a time we are reminded of the words of W.B.Yeats.

From the Fisherman:

The craven man in his seat,  The insolent unreproved— And no knave brought to book, Who has won a drunken cheer— The witty man and his joke, Aimed at the commonest ear,  The clever man who cries  The catch cries of the clown,  The beating down of the wise  And great Art beaten down. 

Words, sadly, that might have been written yesterday. No amount of re-imagining or pivoting to a digital landscape will ever replace the essence of the artistic experience. The temp of a room, the variations in acoustic, the scent of the audience, the moment of pure magic that happens at the end of a work when the notes linger, waiting, giving us space to inhale once more, crucially the rapport that can only exist in live performance between an artist and his or her audience. A connection stolen in a world of ones and zeros, captured on screens with cheap speakers, or on phones. Our artistic friends and performers are struggling to be heard across the city. Trying to find a place in a market of free entertainment. To define as special something that popular media has rendered commonplace.

The danger is that we then ignore this. We dismiss all, because some aspects no longer measure up. Part of this is because we have never been made to examine such things. There is little in a movie that will compare with a theatre experience, yet movies have become dominant in entertainment. They are available at any time, in any location and can be re-watched over to catch elements missed on first viewing. In teaching we learned that the message had to be refocused and that word needed to replace gesture. But in time we have all learned that the quality of the message prevailed. That is what we must also look to about us. We must look to what survives the digital and focus on the voice created for and speaking directly to us. That is a rare and beautiful privilege. An invitation to share in the artistry and magic of superlative performers. So please now as we sense with spring a re-awakening of life about us. The promise of a way out of Covid should also bring a sharpness to our need to fight for our cultural legacy. We all survive and grow from this or we all suffer. Art is a collective.

Look to Musicians now preparing beautifully curated concerts and online festivals for us in our city, refusing to accept constraints, and please support them. Support our novelists, playwrights and poets, and buy their books of wonder and imagination. Enrol in Circus or Dance. Take up Painting or invest in a special piece for your home. Buy an instrument. Give tickets or lessons as gifts. There is a myriad of ways to invest in the intangible, but they all bring immense reward, and allow us to connect with our creative selves. Because if we do not then we face a future in which the uniqueness of us, our cultural identity will be what suffers.

Imagine for a moment that it is your birthday, and that someone special in your life has bought you a vintage camera that, while beautiful and of its kind quite perfect, only shoots in black and white. What now happens is the re-examination of the world about you looking for objects and settings of high contrast that will look beautiful in a mono chromatic setting. 

You begin to search out these things in your everyday environment and, even when the camera is not on your person, you still process the world about you for potential images, discarding all those that fail to meet these new criteria. 

The camera is acting upon your sensibility and allowing you to shape your creativity in one direction. It is now the tool you use to describe your world in artistic terms. But because it is so specific, it is not hard to see how refined the choices it presents are. The tool not only offers you an opportunity to be artistic but it conditions your mind to seek out those very images that it will excel at.

This simple analogy is so that we begin to understand just how critical the tools we give to children actually are. The play children engage in is their attempt to understand and explain their world, but their creative lives are evident from the outset. They colour on any surface available to them (even that freshly painted wall you finished during lockdown!); they dance to music as soon as they can stand; they beat time with their hands from infancy; they sing out of happiness as soon as they find a voice.

Children interact with us creatively from the very beginnings of their lives. It follows then that the environment we place them in can kill or enrich this. Arid childhood filled with stimulus rich but creatively barren technology only desensitises children to their own creative potential and affects their moods, attention spans and has a direct negative impact on their imaginative abilities in later education.

Music is a slowing down of all of that. It is like watching themselves in slow motion. The gesture that produces a note on a piano slowly refined with repetition to produce a sound that is first loud; then soft; then abrupt; now slow and gentle. Each gesture filling their minds with an arsenal of possibilities for when they come to express their innermost selves through a piece of music.

If we teach music as play, and instruments as the toys that enable that activity, we begin to shape the thinking of each child. Then if we make it so that each lesson is filled with possibility and challenge, the child looks to these tools to shape their world in their own image. Each piece of music becomes more than the sum of its parts. No longer just notes on a page but now a statement that is uniquely personal to each child. That is when the choice of music becomes magical and our work as educators takes on a meaning often quoted but seldom realised. Vocation.

Since last March, we have engaged with the majority of students through the use of online platforms like Zoom and Hangouts.

For many parents, this remains the perception of online education. Indeed for many teachers, it was feared that this method would greatly impede their ability to drive a meaningful program of learning, but that is not what happened.

Some of us had been working with online teaching models already. Colourstrings teaching is available online directly with Helsinki. There are a series of prepared videos that are sent to teachers to work with and then a face to face online lesson follows. This became the inspiration for the work we undertook in the school.

About 80% of all students were to take up on lessons online. They received classes from teachers in a scheduled fashion, but then, in most cases, there was access to additional video work which detailed aspects of the teaching and gave students additional tools for their practise at home.

What we discovered was that students are so accustomed to using virtual media that they adapted to this system almost overnight.

Practise became more efficient as students and parents now had clear reference material, and we have just recorded our highest ever scores in RIAM exams. That has been a revelation. After 10 years of teaching, in the midst of our greatest crisis, nearly 70% of all students score marks of 90% and higher.

So what did we learn? We certainly found that homework improved immensely as the quality of the reference material was so much higher, so students made fewer mistakes in their learning, which meant they stayed more engage and made more rapid progress.

In some cases, parents took a greater interest in practise now that they too had clear objectives and comparisons to work with.

We also discovered that the arts practise response globally was to release huge amounts of resources for students and teachers. In effect, there is material available now from some of the most famous teachers in the world online for the very first time.

Even more exciting, we have re-connected with professional friends in foreign countries who will once again offer lessons through the school to our students.

So by curating this material and adding to it in a tailored way we believe we can now offer a level of quality we ourselves questioned when this all began. It is a quantum shift in perception of what is possible and though it will not be the only method we employ for the year ahead we do look at it now with fresh eyes. No matter where we end up once Covid is supressed, the way in which we teach is now different.

In many ways Covid simply accelerated a process that was already beginning. Musicians all around the world now speak to each other differently and share material in a way that will not be reversed and this is truly for the betterment of us all.

This letter should be about something entirely different. But we now occupy a space that has turned the whole world on its head and that now colours everything we do and every space we occupy.

Maoin Cheoil na Gaillimhe is more than a school of music. It is an idea. An idea that every school-going child in Galway should have access to high quality music education. More than this it is the belief that access to this education should not be limited by financial, social or geographical limitations.

Last year we announced that this vision for music in the city had taken a giant leap forward due to the kindness and support of the Lifes2Good trust. That funding and generosity are still in place.

“we are here to welcome you”

When you decide to take that next step on your musical journey, we are here to welcome you, and talk you through the various learning options available.