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Name: Siobhán Brady
Qualifications: B.A. (2018)
Title: Auditor, Trinity Orchestra

About: Trinity Orchestra is the symphony orchestra of Trinity, open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students and staff and its associated colleges. We perform 3 classical concerts annually, two at home and one abroad. We also play arrangements of pop and rock music at some of Ireland’s biggest music festivals every year.

What first sparked your interest in Trinity Orchestra?
Like many of our players, I grew up playing in orchestras - I was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland for three years and a member of the Dublin Youth Orchestras for ten! When I decided not to pursue a degree in music performance, I was eager to find an orchestra to play in while I was at university to keep my cello playing up. The summer before I joined Trinity, I noticed a lot of traction on many social media platforms surrounding Trinity Orchestra’s performance of Gorillaz at Electric Picnic 2014, which made me very eager to join. I also had a few older friends who were in the orchestra and always told me how fun it was.

What makes Trinity Orchestra different from other orchestras?
Trinity Orchestra is Ireland’s only entirely student-run orchestra - we are completely independent from Trinity’s music department. Neither I nor anyone on our committee nor our players, receives any extra academic credit for playing in the orchestra, we all do it because we love it! Aside from playing some really challenging classical repertoire (this year we played Borodin’s Symphony No. 2, and Beethoven’s famous Symphony No. 5), we also give undergraduate and postgraduate students the chance to arrange pop and rock music for us, and to have their music performed at festivals such as Electric Picnic, Metropolis and Forbidden Fruit. This year alone, we performed arrangements of David Bowie, The Beatles, and Red Hot Chilli Peppers, all written by Trinity students.

As Trinity Auditor 2017-18, what are your ambitions for the year ahead?
As Auditor for this year, I really want to take on more projects for smaller ensembles within the Orchestra. I’m hoping to give our younger players more of a chance to play some of our pop music acoustically in some new spaces that the Orchestra has never performed in. Trinity Orchestra is becoming more well-known year on year, and I would love the chance to collaborate with new up-and-coming Irish musicians from outside the Orchestra, to give them a bigger platform to perform on, and to support music by young Irish musicians.

What do you enjoy the most about being involved with Trinity Orchestra?
For me, the actual organisation and coordination of all of our players, performances, and the society as a whole is what I love the most. It’s so rewarding to work with some of my best friends, both on the Committee and the rest of the Orchestra, to pull off so many huge performances every year. It’s understandably a massive task to organise upwards of 80 students at music festivals, abroad on tour every year, and generally just week to week, on top of studying full time. However, it’s all of this work that I find the most rewarding, and that will stay with me more than anything else from my time in university.

Tell us something about Trinity Orchestra that we didn’t know
Trinity Orchestra has actually been a launchpad for many of the most prominent musicians in Ireland and globally at the moment, including Hozier, Karen Cowley from Wyvern Lingo, and Gemma Doherty and Morgan McIntyre from Saint Sister.

What would be a good theme song for your life?
A good theme for my life, especially as a result of my experience in Trinity Orchestra, would be David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. It encompasses all the amazing things we do, and shows how much we can achieve when we work together. Performing this song, joined by Hozier at Electric Picnic 2016 was one of the highlights of my life! You can catch a glimpse here.

What ways can alumni get involved with Trinity Orchestra?
We will hopefully be having a lot more performances next year, all of which are open to all Trinity Alumni to attend, and we would love to see as many alumni at our events as possible! We play such a wide range of music, there’s something there for everyone!