Cream of the Traditional Music crop for Tunes In The Church

Spend any length of time in Galway City Centre these days and it’s likely you’ll be brought to a halt by the crowds around Evergreen Health Shop on Mainguard Street watching the nimble Emma O’Sullivan display her sean-nós dancing skills, accompanied by live traditional music.

Emma’s street performance serves as an unparalleled advertisement for Tunes in the Church, a summer-long series of traditional concerts being held in St Nicholas’s Collegiate Church in which the Renvyle dancer plays a key role.

Tunes in the Church, featuring the cream of Ireland’s musicians, was set up some years ago in Galway by Kerry musician Cormac Begley to give audiences and performers a chance to interact in a non-pub, non-session environment.

The venue was the medieval St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church and that still the base. Cormac has since moved to Dublin and now runs Tunes in the Church there at the Unitarian Church on Stephen’s Green, while Emma and Christopher Place have taken responsibility for running the Galway concerts.

Emma is a sublime dancer, whose warm personality comes through in her performances, and who has won awards all over the place, but she laughs as she says she didn’t start dancing until she was 20, when she was studying for a Business and Marketing degree at GMIT.

At the time, she was dating a sean-nós dancer who was so committed to his work that all of their dates were scheduled around his performances and practices.

Emma had grown up in a family steeped in traditional music and dancing and while she had learned neither, she realised when watching her then boyfriend that she had an instinctive feel for sean-nós dancing.

“Something clicked,” she recalls.

“Every step he was doing, I could almost predict what was coming up next. I just got the language.”

Tunes In The Church is running in the city from Monday to Friday throughout July, and seven nights a week in August.

Some of the 100 guest musicians taking part this year include harpists Laoise Kelly and Kathleen Loughnane, flute players Harry Bradley and Gary Hastings, accordion players Brendan Begley, Andrew McNamara and Colm Gannon, singer Niamh Parsons, uilleann pipers Tommy Keane, Maitiú Ó Casaide and Cormac Cannon, and concertina players Cormac Begley and Jacqueline McCarthy. That’s just a sample of the talent.

Each session is broken into two halves, with a core group taking part in the first half.

They include 22-year-old Clarinbridge accordion player Conor Connolly “who is gifted and has an old head”, says Emma. He has a lot of tunes from South and East Galway and is able to put these in context for the audience, being a natural storyteller, she adds. Similarly, with harpist Úna Ní Fhlanagáin, who has a background in music education.

The numbers attending Tunes in the Church this year are up on last summer with a mix of foreign and Irish tourists. Emma describes Tunes in the Church as an evening of “amazing music, fully acoustic, in a relaxed, zen-like atmosphere”, and says it’s a chance to engage with “the cream of the crop” in a unique way.

Tickets are €15 per person and include a tour of the historic medieval church.

Fore more about Tunes In The Church see this week’s Galway City Tribune digital edition here or download our app.