Jane tunes up for a busy year

Lifestyle – Jane O’Leary’s life revolves around music, as a composer, teacher, promoter and researcher. Born in the US, she moved to Ireland in the early 1970s and has played a major role in opening Irish ears to classical music via organisations such as Music for Galway and the Galway Music Residency. With four premieres of her own work due to be performed in Ireland and the UK early in 2020, she’s not resting on her laurels.

“I never say I’m a composer, it’s just part of my musical life,” says American-born Jane O’Leary, who has been key to the development of classical music in Galway and Ireland since she moved to this country from the US in 1972.

Now, in her early 70s, Jane is enjoying one of the busiest periods of her composing career, with four of her works due to be presented on stage in Ireland and in England between now and April.

All four are important to this woman, who brings a professional approach to everything she does, but one has a particular resonance because there’s a family connection.

In May, Some Call it Home will be performed at the Theatre Royal, Plymouth, to mark the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower sailing to the New World. It set out from Plymouth in September 1640, with 102 passengers and crew on board.  Most were Puritans and Separatists, fleeing religious persecution in England. Those who survived and settled in Massachusetts at a place they named Plymouth, became known collectively as the Pilgrims and were responsible for the first written constitution in America.

Jane and another musician, New York-based Jonathan Dawe were commissioned to write the score for Some Call it Home, a multi-media event which explores humans’ relationship with the earth and our environment, from the Mayflower crossing to the landing of Apollo 8 on the moon in 1968, when astronaut Bill Anders captured the famous image of our planet, Earthrise.

What the director of the piece, Robert Taub, didn’t know when he commissioned Jane to co-write Some Call it Home, was that she’s a direct descendent of one of the Mayflower passengers, Robert Warren.

Jane laughs as she says Warren produced many descendants, so she never thought too much about that lineage, although it did matter to her architect father.  Others from Warren’s direct line include the US Civil War general and President Ulysses S. Grant; President Franklin D. Roosevelt; and Alan B. Shepard, Jr. the first American in space and the fifth person to walk on the moon.

Jane grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, where at the age of four she took up piano of her own volition.

“I wanted to,” she says simply. She credits her mother, who had trained as an artist but worked as a housewife, for nurturing her creativity.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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