Many classically trained musicians end up working as performers within the wedding industry, but this can often be seen as a detrimental move in terms of a performing career — what are your thoughts on this?

This depends on how the performer wants to be viewed. I performed at weddings for years and it was a good way of earning extra money. I did this while I was at college and a lot of the time it was fun, but I always take any music job I have seriously. I am a firm believer in delivering the best of yourself when someone puts their trust in you and is willing to pay for your services. If weddings (or funerals) are all that you do then, yes, you can be typecast and become known as a ‘wedding singer’. That’s ok unless you want to be known for something that you have a bigger passion for. I guess you have to be careful in this regard sometimes.

Having studied performance at DIT and established your name as a singer and flautist, what motivated the change in trajectory towards composition?

I have had a very varied journey in music right from the beginning. I started my musical career at 4 years of age playing guitar for the local church choir — I picked it up so quickly and my mother knew immediately that I had a flare for music. I then went on to study classical guitar and did a few exams with Trinity College, London. However, at the age of 12 I gave up the guitar and music training because I hated practicing scales. A few years later I was involved in a drama group and we put on a production using the music from The Missionas the underscore to the drama. This was a turning point in my musical journey. I completely fell in love with the music of Ennio Morricone…I was obsessed. So I went home and asked my mother if I could take up piano.

I remember saying to the piano teacher in my first lesson: “I don’t want to learn how to play the piano, I just want to be able to play the music from The Mission on the piano”. So the piano teacher wrote simplified versions of all the music and within weeks I could play the music from the film — I was lucky enough to be able tell this story to Ennio Morricone while working on his concert in Kilmainham in Dublin.

A few years later I took up flute and progressed rapidly through all the grades. I then decided to do flute performance in college in DIT. While at college I started getting a bit of work directing for musicals. I always knew the sound I wanted from the singers but couldn’t tell them how to produce this, as I knew very little about singing. So following advice from RTÉ Lyric fm presenter Liz Nolan (who is compére for my forthcoming debút show in the National Concert Hall), I took up singing lessons and sat all my grades, in tangent with all my exams in percussion up to diploma level for the same reason.

I have always enjoyed performing but some years ago I started experimenting with composition. I kind of just fell into it. I wrote a series of flute studies and the great Irish flautist William Dowdall had a look at them and put them on the syllabus for the Royal Irish Academy of Music. I then published under the title Trifecta. Having received critical acclaim in the USA, the publication earned the prizewinner award at the ‘NFA Newly Published Music Competition’ (USA), and was added to the National Flute Library of America. This encouraged me to keep going and so I published a second book entitled All That I Could for Flute, Cello and Piano. This too received an award in America. By this time I was conducting a lot of concerts and choirs and so started writing new music for these concerts. It was such a thrill to hear my compositions come to life.