Comhrá Ceoil: Music and Dance Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway, is delighted to announce the inaugural lecture in the Martin Reilly Lecture Series, which will take place at 6.30pm on Tuesday, 21 February in Galway City Library.

This series is dedicated to Martin Reilly, the celebrated East Galway uilleann piper, who left a rich musical legacy to generations of pipers.  The lecture series will give an opportunity to researcher-practitioners in Irish traditional music and dance to present their research in a public forum and the audience will get to hear some tunes, see some dancing and listen to some songs as well.  Galway and the West of Ireland has long been an important centre of traditional dance, music and song and this lecture series reflects the increasing interest in the study of these traditions.

Supported by the Centre for Irish Studies, NUI Galway, the first lecture will be given by Dr Jimmy O’Brien Moran, a Waterford uilleann piper and researcher well known to the traditional music community west of the Shannon.  Jimmy’s talk, ‘Folk Music Collecting in Galway before the Famine’, will focus on the Galway piper Paddy Conneely and his collectors (Petrie, the Hudson brothers, William Forde and Henry Westenra aka Lord Rossmore) and will include a mention of Martin Reilly who was, for a few years, a contemporary of Conneely.

As a young student, Jimmy attended NUI Galway and currently lectures at the Waterford Institute of Technology. As a piper he has been invited to give lectures, workshops and concerts all over the world from Seattle to the Seychelles and from old Zealand to New Zealand). Jimmy said: “It is an honour to be invited to give the opening lecture in the Martin Reilly series and I am looking forward to coming back to the City of the Tribes.”

A reception will take place before the talk at 6.15pm, when Jackie Small will officially launch the lecture series.  All are invited to attend both the launch and lecture.  Admission is free.

Further information on this and other planned talks in the series is available at

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Martin-Reilly-Lecture-Series/289147347801522or e-mail: Martinreillylectureseries@gmail.com

 ENDS