About Claire ….

Forgive me for writing Claire’s biography instead of herself, but those of you who have meet and experienced Claire live and in person will understand why.

For one, Claire in person surrounds us all with an instant loving charisma that tells more than any words that she or I could write. However, for those of you who have not met or experienced Claire in performance yet I will attempt to introduce her to you as best as I am able.

Claire is a very humble person so it is difficult to encourage her to share the steps of her past that brought her to her incredible presence and performance that we can experience in her company today.

It was around 1999 or 2000 when I was first introduced to Claire and her music by an excellent singer songwriter, Brendan O’ Loughlin. Brendan is a singer songwriter from Limerick, now living in Pheonix, AZ, who started his days as a successful showband musician. When the showband days in Ireland faded Brendan emigrated to the USA and enjoyed a few years as a successful touring performer in the USA. During the late 90s I helped Brendan to revive his music distribution using online MP3s. He then introduced me to Claire.

Since then I have learned some things about Claire’s music past, usually from other people.

One of these people is a Florida dj who assisted Claire during her brief time of being a Florida resident herself. For many, many years, William Ramatour has been the presenter of “Irish Ways”, a radio show on Flagler College Radio WFCF 88.5fm in St Augustine Florida , every Sunday morning at 11 a.m E.S.T. Since William’s show was streamed worldwide at http://radio.flagler.edu and linked to his MySpace page he has gained one of the largest wordwide online listening audiences for a Celtic music programme.

While Claire lived in the USA, and since her return to Ireland, William helped Claire into some wonderful professional opportunities in the USA such as opening for The Chieftains and The Fureys and performing at festivals such as The Florida Folk Festival.

Once upon a time …..

Claire’s music started as a child on a grand piano in her parent’s home. That wonderful grand piano has recently been restored and placed in Claire’s newly renovated home. As a child and through her teens Claire spent hours exploring both her voice and piano with improvisations that from time to time poured out wonderful flowing and mysterious songs. During these sessions Claire kept a reel to reel tape machine running and they truly captured and archived some timeless magic.

Recently, not only did the piano get dusted down, re-tuned and brought back to life again but Claire’s ancient reel to reel recordings were transcribed onto minidiscs and then archived as digital files. Soon, Claire aims to release a cd of these songs.

Meanwhile, Claire is best known for her hypnotic and soul rising singing accompanied by her collection of gothic looking antique harps. Every live performance feels like a transportation into another world, a peaceful ancient world before the stresses and rush of today. If there is a land of the Sidhe, a concert by Claire will take you there ….. and return you home safely, fully recharged for your days to come

So how did Claire manage to become such an ethereal and surreal performer that is loved by all?

The Study & Radio Broadcast Years:

After studying Anglo Irish literature at Trinity College, Dublin, Claire started considering converting some of these classic works to music and looked at the harp as being a better instrument for this than the piano. She has since trained for playing the Irish Harp with Mairin Feiritear of the Sion Hill Convent, Dublin, where Mary O’Hara learned her craft, and studied playing the Concert Harp with Catriona Yeats at the College of Music, Dublin and Denise Kelly at R.I.A.M., Dublin.

Claire’s early apprenticeship on harp including entering competitions, where she did very well in song categories. This led to a series of live performances on Ireland’s RTE radio, through the 80s, and such shows as “Sounds Promising”, “Cursai” and the “Ronan Collins Show”.

The Wedding Music Years

In her quest to become a full time professional musician Claire thought of the idea of offering the harp to provide music for weddings as an alternative for the usual organ music. Claire advertised this idea and some brides caught the vision of reviving this ancient tradition and booked Claire to be part of their dream weddings. Through referrals Claire received more wedding music work than she could handle. Other singer harpists also recognized this idea and offered the same service. Now harp music at weddings has become popular not only through Ireland but through the USA, Canada, Australia and many other countries. We are not sure if Claire inspired the revival of this tradition but it certainly became popular soon after she started it.

While working as a wedding harpist and singer, Claire was never far away from her dream of matching her love of Anglo Irish poetry to music. During 1997 Claire finally entered the recording studio to record a project she had worked on for many years, a collection of poems by William Butler Yeats set to music.

The First Recording Years

During 1997 Claire’s first album “Dancing In The Wind” was released and performed at the Yeats Festival in Sligo. These musical interpretations of Yeats has become the headline work for Claire’s concert performances to this day and beyond..

Two years later, “Dancing In The Wind” was followed up with a release of a collection of very intimate, moving and well produced selection from Claire’s original songs that she had written over 20 years. It is called “Out Of The Ordinary: Songs Of Love And Loss”.

Australia Calls

With two wonderful albums now creating a wonderful singer harpist repertoire Claire was invited to perform her first concert tour of Australia. While in Australia Claire’s songs and music was very well received but she discovered that the Irish patriots of Australia longed to hear some of the songs and tunes of the Irish tradition.

On her return from her first Australian tour, Claire recorded “Lilt Of The Banshee” to include these popular requested songs. She also managed to slip in a couple more poems to music songs by Thomas Moore and Austin Clarke.

Claire returned from Australia to perform at more weddings than ever before and released an album providing the layout of music for a typical Irish Wedding called, “An Irish Wedding Ceremony”, which has since been withdrawn for re-packaging but will be re-released soon due to popular demand.

From “An Irish Wedding Ceremony” one song became a huge worldwide mp3 download hit. “Bi, a Iosa am Croise”, a beautiful ancient Irish hymn that Claire performs with her Irish harp. This song was downloaded over 100,000 times and reached top 5 positions in several mp3 download charts.

This song, and other mp3 download releases, created interest when Claire re-visited Florida, USA during the spring of 2003 for a tour that included a performance at the Florida Folk Festival.

New Audiences In Ireland

After another concert tour of Australia in 2001 Claire decided to venture into doing a major solo concert in Ireland. In February 2002 this was at the National Concert Hall, Dublin which was very well attended.

This led to more concerts bookings around Ireland including summer solstice concerts at St. Patrick’s church, Tara Hill for summer solstices 2003 and 2004. A dvd of these two concerts will be re-released soon.

The Tara Solstice concerts entered Claire into a new audience of spiritual pilgrims to Ireland and since then Claire has been invited to perform for various visiting pilgrimage group on tour or attending Celtic spirituality workshops.

It is through these intimate concerts that Claire revealed her wonderful skill as a storyteller and be as moving with her stories as she is through singing her songs.

Claire also decided to retire from performing wedding music for awhile and passed this work to other wonderful harpists. Claire decided she needed more time to concentrate on learning more music, recording, performing more concerts and have time for her other passion of restoring old vernacular buildings.

There have been more successful Australian tours during 2004, 2006 and earlier this year, 2007. Each time the fans have grown and the audiences have become larger. 2006 also included performances in New Zealand.

The Singing Harps

Surprisingly, the World Harp Congress festival at Dublin, during summer 2005, featured very little harp music from Ireland and no singer harpists at all except a lecture by Mary O’Hara in an out of the way college lecture room at 10:00 am in the morning!

I suggested to Claire that we ought to gather some Irish singer harpists and put on a fringe event during the congress festival. The “fringe” event did happen, but not at the time of the congress.

Claire teamed together with fellow singer harpists Madeleine Doherty and Fionnuala Monks, all wonderful singer harpist performers, all Irish and all with very different styles. Together, with the mission to showcase the “singer harpist”, an almost lost tradition in Ireland, they performed a well attended concert at Dublin’s National Concert Hall during November 2005 and repeated to double the audience size in spring 2007.

One of the audience commented, “what a great night, a night of variety, the showgirl, healer and mystic!”. Claire is the one he was describing as the “mystic”.

We look forward to more future shows and performances by “The Singing harps”

Veil Between Two Worlds

Please excuse me for plugging my own project here, but as I was writing my book of that title, I soon realized that it could not be complete, and certainly not performed, without the voice, presence, harmony and entertaining stories of Claire.

“Veil Between Two Worlds” is a story through Ireland’s ancient history from the Tuatha De Dannan until the present that tells the stories of the various incarnations of Brighid and Lugh both in their human and god and goddess forms. The veil between the worlds of Brighid and Lugh is symbolized by the harp, the oldest symbol of Ireland’s tradition.

Over a year ago, Claire performed for me an ancient Gaelic song dedicated to Brigid. At that time she had taken it from an old manuscript and at that time it sounded like any student taking a song from a music sheet.

Claire took that song on tour with her through Australia and when she returned that ancient song had become a Claire song that I now feel is the most stunning, most moving song that she now performs.

Claire is now taking an active part in some of our “Veil Between Two Worlds” tours of ancient sites and traditions. We have started developing and performing a stage show of “Veil Between Two Worlds”. Performance, documentary and even acted films on dvd are being created or planned to accompany the book and tours. With every opportunity, Claire now shares that beautiful Brigid song.

Other Recordings To Come

Claire’s leading music project at present is to release a CD of the earliest of her piano ramblings and recordings using some of the original tracks recorded combined with modern interpretations of that work.

This did have the working title of “Antiquities” as this referred to the songs being of the earliest that Claire composed combined with the antique furnishings and decor that surrounded Claire when she first composed and recorded them. A photographer recently came up with a name of “Adrift” to describe a set of photos he took of Claire during a photo session. “Adrift” is now the working title of these earliest works of Claire as it aptly describes the songs and music of this time.

Australian tours has also motivated Claire to learn more songs from Ireland’s tradition that are loved by her Australian, and now other, audiences. There are now more than enough songs to compile a wonderful follow up to the “Lilt Of The Banshee” collection.

Claire is also returning to Australia during September for a second tour this year that will also record her with the Tara Singers choir in Brisbane for the release of a wonderful harp, Claire and choir choral cd!

Over the years, Claire has also learned songs and adapted more poetry to music from Anglo Irish writers such as Thomas Moore and Austin Clarke. One day they will also be recorded for a release.

I wonder if Claire will put music to the poetry of her life long favourite poet, Richard Murphy, that she had the pleasure to share the stage with in concert in Sligo during August 2005?

And to Enjoy A Live Performance by Claire?

It will probably be be very rare to find Claire performing club tours, on theatre stages and at festivals.

What Claire enjoys most is sharing intimate concerts in country estate house drawing rooms, chapels, heritage visitor’s centres, art centres, beside holy wells or similar.

Fortunately, what many people enjoy most is sharing an intimate concert with Claire in the same places. So please find out when Claire Roche is performing near you

……. or maybe you would like to arrange for Claire to perform near you?

Please do visit Claire’s web site