4 Sharing good practice: the Finding A Voice Music Festival

LAURA HAMER

Welcome, Roísín. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and about the Finding A Voice Music Festival?

ROISIN MAHER

My name is Roísín Maher. I’m a lecturer in Munster Technological University, Cork School of Music, and I'm also the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Finding A Voice Music Festival. I founded the festival in 2017 with my sister, Clíona, and we’ve just had our eighth version, eighth edition of the festival. And it is a festival of music by women composers and creators across different genres and eras. And it takes place around International Women’s Day [8 March] every year. So it runs over usually three or four days. And all the music is by women, but we include lots of different genres of music. So the focus is mainly classical music, but also jazz, improvised music, musical theatre, traditional Irish music, early music. So it’s very broad and singer-songwriters as well.

LAURA HAMER

Could you tell us a little bit about how you’ve approached building an audience for women's music in Clonmel?

ROISIN MAHER

I suppose the approach to building an audience is very much a work in progress. The audience in Clonmel is a rural audience in a town that’s comparatively underserved by music provision. And so to a certain extent, we have an advantage because audiences aren’t necessarily being offered a range of different musics. So people tend to take a chance, I suppose, really on Finding A Voice. I think that the approach has been kind of multi-pronged. And so we include music across different genres. So there’s usually popular music, traditional music, jazz, musical theatre. And that helps to build an audience because sometimes people will go to one thing and then take a chance on something else that they might not be as familiar with. There are a few hardcore festival pass holders who will go to pretty much everything in the festival. One of the other things that we do is to try and contextualise the music. So we have talks and encourage the performers to talk to the audience if that’s something that they feel comfortable with. We have interviews with composers, pre-concert talks, post-concert Q&As. So I think that that all helps us to build an audience. And we also partner up with other organisations and cultural providers in Clonmel. So for example, the local library, the museum, the art centre, and try and do work with them. We also partner up with a provider of music education in schools, music generation. And so we have workshops with secondary school students, primary school students in the run-up to the festival. And that all helps to build an audience as well. We also make sure that ticket pricing is something that is very affordable for people. There are always at least one or two events that are free, again, to encourage people to come and then perhaps book a ticket for something else later on. So there’s always something that’s free. We’ve also had a musician in residence in the past and that’s proved very successful. And we’ve had the musician in residence play in local nursing homes, in shopping malls, in schools. So again, I suppose, as I said, it’s a multi-pronged approach to building an audience. I suppose classical music audiences generally tend to be attracted by names that they recognise, you know, and that there might be one piece that they recognise and then they’ll go in and listen to other music that might not be as familiar. For us, we don’t have that because most of the music is unfamiliar to everyone, sometimes even including myself. But I think that one of the things we encourage the audience to do is, you know, feel like we’re all on an adventure of discovery. You know, we’re all hearing this music maybe live for the first time. You know, it might be the first time the performers have played it. So it’s about building trust over the years in the programming and in the performances and the music.

LAURA HAMER

And how have you secured funding for finding a voice, Roísín?

ROISIN MAHER

Well, we’ve been very fortunate in that we’ve been funded by the Arts Council of Ireland from the very beginning. So initially we applied for a Music Program Award, a Music Project Award, and we got funding under that stream for the first three years. And then since then we have gone under their Arts Grant funding, which is for more established activities. We also get funding from our local County Council, so Tipperary County Council, the Arts Office there. And we get a certain amount of commercial sponsorship. It’s quite low and it’s something that I’d like to build on. We’re also lucky to get support in kind from the National Broadcaster, which is RTÉ. So they have a program called RTÉ Supporting the Arts. And again, we’ve been fortunate enough to get support from that every year since the beginning. And what that does is it gives us free advertising on the National kind of classical music station Lyric FM. So that’s a huge cost saving, I suppose, and benefit to us. So lots of diverse stream. Obviously we’ve got audience ticket sales as well, but we do try to keep ticket prices very affordable. So that, I suppose, that’s part of the audience building as well, making things affordable.

LAURA HAMER

Could you tell us a bit about your approach to building programmes for the festival?

ROISIN MAHER

I look at the four days of the festival and try to include as many different genres of music as I can. It’s not always possible to include every different genre every year. And the focus is usually on contemporary and classical music. I look at what is planned and try to include something that is maybe a little bit different. So it could be musical theatre, it could be jazz, traditional music, something that's genre defining or defying. For the first few years, I was really determined not to create some alternative canon of works and composers in terms of women’s music. And so I would insist that performances not be repeated or particular pieces not be repeated. And then over the years, I’ve had to relax that partly because I realised that in fact, listening to different performances of the same piece by different performers is part of the experience for audiences. And it’s been interesting for me as well to see the pieces that start to emerge as being the ones that are repeated. The other thing I take into consideration when programming is the performers, their own background and their own experience in performing music by women. So some performers automatically include a lot of music by women composers. And so they might already have quite a bit of repertoire and it’s about really looking then at what would work best in this particular context. For other performers, they might never have performed a piece of music by a woman composer, or they might not have done a whole program of music by a woman composer. And so when it comes to that, I suppose it’s a process of negotiation really with performers. The other thing that I look at is what I like to call anniversary capitals. So looking at anniversaries, centenaries, bicentenaries and so on, significant dates in terms of women composers. 2019 was the Bicentenary of Clara Schumann. And so we did a lot of work around including pieces by Clara Schumann and also commissioning works that were inspired by Clara Schumann. It was also the 400th anniversary of the Italian composer Barbara Strozzi and so we also asked performers to include pieces by Strozzi if possible. I also ask performers where possible to include a piece by an Irish composer. So it’s very important to me that we’re supporting both contemporary and historical Irish composers. And also where possible to include non-white composers. So composers from Latin America, different parts of the world. It’s not always possible obviously if someone is presenting a programme of music from the Renaissance and Baroque, that might not be possible. But certainly if it is a programme of music from the19th, 20th, 21st century, it’s something that I encourage performers to look at.

LAURA HAMER

Thank you very much for sharing your experiences with the Finding A Voice festival, Roísín.