Vibrant school of music marks 25 years of nurturing young students

Date Published: {J}

BY BERNIE NÍ FHLATHARTA

Thousands of children and young adults from Galway City and County have learned their music at the School of Music which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year at its home in the Galway Technical Institute in Galway City.

The children who come from near and far, are aged from six upwards and many of them have since gone on to pursue music at third level while most of the current students make up the bulk of the Galway Youth Orchestra, which practices every Saturday in the common room at the GTI on Fr Griffin Road.

In fact any Saturday or any evening after 5pm from Monday to Thursday, you will hear the sound of music emanating from the classrooms on the school’s three levels. There’s the violin, the viola, classical and modern guitar, a few woodwind instruments, keyboards and the trumpet and that doesn’t cover all the instruments that are being taught there. A walk through the corridors of the school during these classes leaves you in no doubt that the teaching of music is very much alive in the City of the Tribes.

As well as all the practical aspect of learning musical instruments, students are taught the theory of music and a there is also a range of Post Leaving Cert courses at the GTI on many aspects of music technology and broadcasting. Tuition for these courses involves the school’s own radio station, which is streamed internally, as well as a state of the art recording studio, which is sometimes used by professional musicians.

But mostly the Art Deco building, erected in 1938 on what was then wasteland, is home to the School of Music, a scheme set up in the mid1980s by the Galway City Vocational Education Board, partly in response to a growing demand for some sort of formal music education in a city that was just gaining a reputation for its arts and culture.

It seemed the whole town at the time – the ’80s – was baying for a school or a college of music. A few premises were mentioned as being suitable venues, one being the former Redemptorist home, Cluain Mhuire in Wellpark. Its high-ceilinged rooms were considered ideal acoustically. But of course this didn’t happen and the GMIT took it over for their film and television department.

For a time, it was thought that University College Galway (since renamed NUI Galway) would set up a third level course and eventually a Chair of Music was formed in the college but was never filled because of the absence of a feeder school in the catchment area.

To this day, every once in a while there is the sporadic call for a ‘school of music’ for Galway. Meanwhile many people are completely unaware of the level of music that is actually being taught in the city and county week in, week out, not only in the GTI but in private homes, mostly in voice coaching and piano lessons.

In fact, the call for the school of music is like waving a red rag to a bull for Jimmy Brick, Principal of the GTI.

A Kerry native and a former city councillor, Jimmy has lived in Galway City for over 30 years and is proud of his school’s achievements, especially the School of Music.

“A school of music is not about a big, white marble building with concert halls and music rooms. It’s about the teaching of music and that is certainly going on here and has been going on here for nearly 25 years.

“It annoys me when I hear these calls for a school of music and people saying that Galway’s cultural hub isn’t complete without such a school, but if we were to wait for a formal, physical, dedicated building before we could teach a note, we would be waiting forever,” he says passionately.

Jimmy proudly oversees thousands of students every year at GTI between full-time pupils, those in adult education and those learning music in the evenings and Saturdays.

What used to be a technical school, known as ‘the Tech’ has certainly evolved over the years. One of the framed newspaper articles hanging up in the ground-floor corridor boasts that the newly-built school in 1938 was going to teach women to be domestic goddesses. In fact one of the bigger classrooms upstairs, which is now where hairdressing is taught, used to be the domestic science room. The huge fireplace surround is still visible but the big range is replaced by cupboards full of hairdressing supplies and clean towels.

The GTI is one of those institutions that has responded to the demands from the community over the years and moved away from the traditional trades when the demand for Post Leaving Cert courses increased.

Nowadays, the GTI is a hive of activity for all ages because it has opened its doors to schemes like the School of Music, which attracts children as young as five and six to adult evening classes.

It was this flexibility in the mid 1980s that led to the then VEC committee responding to the demand for the formal teaching of music to include a wide array of instruments outside piano and instruments traditionally associated with Irish music, such as the tin whistle and button accordion.

Jimmy says that the scheme was always going to be self-financing – in other words paid by parents – but with the assistance of 1,000 teaching hours from the GTI, an arrangement that exists to this day.

For more, read page 27 of this week’s City Tribune.