SUMMER SCHOOL OF EARLY IRISH HARP
MARY O'DONNELL
Lecturer, Scoil na gCláirseach
Mary O'Donnell began her harp studies with the late Sr. Eugene McCabe
at Mount Sackville School in Dublin and she later studied with Fiona
Norwood, Sebastien Lipman and attended masterclasses with the renowned
harpist and teacher Edward Witsenberg. In 1992 she was awarded an
Entrance Exhibition to Trinity College Dublin and graduated with an
honours degree in Music in 1996. As an undergraduate, she completed
her ARIAM in Irish Harp and LTCL in Concert Harp performance. She also
holds a Higher Diploma in Education and a Masters in Musicology (with a
specialism in Ethnomusicology) from University College Dublin.
She has won many prizes at competitions throughout the country and at the Dublin Feis Ceoil, she has won first prize in all Junior and Senior Irish and Concert Harp competitions, as well as prizes in singing and composition (Dr. Annie Patterson Medal). Mary is a former member of the National Youth Orchestra, RTE Cor na nOg, Belfast Harp Orchestra and has performed with many ensembles and orchestras (amateur and professional) throughout the country. She has appeared on RTE, BBC, CNN, and NBC and has toured extensively with different groups throughout Europe, North America, Africa and most recently to Asia. Mary was a lecturer in Ethonmusicology at the VEC from 2000-2005 and is an examiner with the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin.
Her PhD research is entitled Custodians of Culture: A Social, Musicological and Cultural History of the Irish Harp and its Patronage from 1790-1840. The turbulent political and cultural climate of the period 1790-1840 is central to understanding the contemporary perceptions of, and transformations to, the Irish Harp during the early nineteenth century. This period can be divided into three sub-periods: 1790-1800, 1801-1828, 1829-1840. Each period is marked by dramatic political changes. These resulted in a transition from a period of utopian aspiration for liberty and equality, through the emergence of a bourgeois Protestant predominantly urban class, who desperately sought to carve an identity from their combined colonial and Celtic heritages, to the period of the emergence of a quasi-emancipated middle-class Catholic population. The periods roughly correspond to the contemporary movements and ideologies of Enlightenment, Romanticism and Romantic/Cultural Nationalism. She envisages examining each sub-period from an ideological perspective and from the perspective of the social and cultural Anglo/Irish-Irish and later Protestant-Catholic dichotomies with a view to establishing why the transition from the old to the neo-Irish harping traditions was so sudden and dramatic during this period. Her supervisors for PhD are Professor Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Professor Tom Moylan and Dr. Ruan O'Donnell. Mary is an IRCHSS Government of Ireland scholar.