Murphy Roche Workshops

Workshops

Murphy Roche organizes and sponsors workshops with many local and international musicians. Most of these events were free to our members. Here are some of the workshops we have offered our members over the years:

Mike Austin comes from a family with a professional musical tradition that spans at least four generations to his bandleading great-grandfather, who was a personal friend of John Phillip Sousa. Mike began playing drums as a young boy, somewhere around the age of 5. His first teacher was his father, a jazz and concert band drummer who co-founded the Joliet American Legion Band, the most celebrated concert and marching band of its kind in the nation. (In between, there was a mandolin-playing grandfather, too.) Mike played drums in school concert bands and garage rock bands until entering high school. As a competitive student-athlete, he took a hiatus from music and returned to it after college. This is when he changed his focus exclusively to Irish traditional music, which he first experienced as a teenager during a family trip to Ireland. Since then Mike has been a featured performer on the bodhran at several major music festivals in the United States and Ireland, including the Ennis Traditional Music Festival in County Clare, Ireland; Celtic Fest Chicago and Taste of Chicago, and Milwaukee Irish Fest. He has performed and recorded with some of the world’s most renowned Irish musicians in venues large and small, from cozy pubs across Ireland to Chicago's Symphony Center. A member of the Irish traditional band The Boils, Mike has also been a staff instructor at the prestigious Old Town School of Folk Music since 2000. He is a two-time finalist in the senior bodhran competition of the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, and a former adjudicator of the Midwest Fleadh Cheoil.

Murphy Roche Irish music school presented a Slow Airs Workshop for fiddlers, with All-Ireland Champion Blake Ritter, on Saturday, Dec 4th, 2010. The workshop took place at 4:30pm, at Two Way Street Coffee House 1047 Curtiss St., Downers Grove, IL 60515. A concert followed, at 8:00pm. Admission to the workshop was $20, and workshop attendees received free admission to the concert—general admission to concert was $20. Admission to both events was free for Murphy Roche Members.

Máire Ní Chéileachair teaches Sean Nós singing to young people in the Muskerry area since 2000 under the Aisling Gheal Scheme which promotes and preserves the sean nós singing tradition. she has won numerous prizes at Sean Nós singing competitions at Oireachtas na Gaeilge over the years. She has given workshops and performed at music and singing festivals all over Ireland and abroad. She has a C.D. with songs in both the Irish and English language called “Guth ar fán”

Paddy O'Brien, Musical Director for CCE