Ancient music finds a champion in Maura

City Lives – Denise McNamara meets Maura Ó Cróinín, the founder of Galway Early Music Festival

It may not boast the same profile as other more brash festivals about town, but next year the Galway Early Music Festival will quietly celebrate an impressive milestone – its 20th anniversary.

If this long-gone era is not your thing, you may have missed the array of concerts, music and dance workshops as well as lectures given about the town as part of this year’s event. But those Roman centurions commanding attention in the city centre with their distinct brass horn instruments may well have caught your eye.

Fresh from organising the 19th festival, Maura Ó Cróinín has long been the driving force behind the four-day event which attracts up to 100 people to the headline concerts.

The festival is regarded as a leading light internationally in the promotion of ancient, medieval and renaissance music.

This year the programme was organised around the theme of musical instruments discovered by archaeologists. Featuring strange sounding instruments such as a tibia (a wooden organ pipe), a carnyx (a bronze trumpet) and lyre (small harp), the event presented a rare chance to hear long extinct musical sounds.

The main Saturday night concert at St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church was hailed as a celebration of war and peace, focusing on the music and instruments of the Roman world and the Celtic world, which would meet on the great battlefields of Europe.

The first part performed by the group, Ancient Music Ireland, centred on the legend Táin Bó Fraích, (the Driving of the Cattle of Fraech) and the love story between Fraech and Findabair, which was brought to life by ancient horns, trumpets, carnyx, great sea shells, animal horns, bodhrán and flute. Two Iron Age trumpeters heralded the battle by the Celts against the Romans.

The second part was performed by Ludi Scaenici, an ensemble which brings to life the Roman world’s museums, amphitheatres and archaeological sites.

The names of the instruments they played sounded like a lesson in Latin – the tibiae (organ pipes), syrinx (pan flute), bucina (brass horn), tympanum (flat tambourine), lyra (small harp), cornu (brass horn), cymbals (cymbals), tuba (straight trumpet), obliquum (zylophone) and crotala (castanets).

Maura Ó Cróinín has been at the helm since this quirky festival first began. A Californian with a love of all things ancient, she played recorder and early Irish harp in a musical group called The Good Ladies of Galway, which was set up in the 1980s

This consisted of a few members of the Galway Baroque Singers and the Cois Claddagh Choir and they decided to travel to Waterford’s Lismore Early Music Festival for a weekend.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.