For over a decade, Róisín Maher has been teaching a module called ‘Women in Music’ on the music degree at CIT Cork School of Music, and it’s within this module that the origins of the Finding a Voice concert series lie.
Maher began the module when she saw that the situation regarding female composers was not changing.
I kind of got to a certain age and I thought… nothing is changing, or it’s not changing quick enough… [students were] playing the same stuff that I was playing when I was a student and that was 30 years ago.
When her sister Cliona, then Director of South Tipperary Arts Centre in Clonmel, asked her for ideas for programming in the summer of 2017, Róisín suggested a series of concerts by women composers. They applied to the Arts Council for funding, expecting to receive support for maybe one of six concerts, but funding came through for the whole series, and the first event took place in March 2018 to coincide with International Women’s Day.
Read the full article here: Journal of Music