Students from Gaelscoil Adhamhnáin in Letterkenny are on a high as they prepare to perform at the All-Ireland final of the prestigious Walton’s Music for Schools competition.
Just six primary schools and six secondary schools are chosen to perform in the All-Ireland concert every year, which takes place next Tuesday 2nd May in the National Concert Hall, Dublin.
Forty Gaelscoil pupils in the Meitheal group entered the competition with their song ‘Saol Gan Cheol, Saol Gan Anam’ (A World without Music Is a World without Soul).
The finalists were selected based on several criteria, including musicality, originality, inclusiveness and how effectively and creatively they addressed this year’s Competition Theme, ‘Music Has No Borders’.
Watch Meitheal’s entry here:
Gaelscoil Adhamhnáin (430 students) provides a wide range of extra-curricular music tuition for its students before school, after school and at lunchtime. The school’s board of management helps to finance this tuition, and the school also works with the Donegal Music Education Partnership and Ceol na Coille, a school of Irish traditional music, to provide it.
‘Saol Gan Cheol, Saol Gan Anam’ was created by students after they came together to contemplate the competition theme, look at the individual members, think of their local area, think of Donegal, think of Ireland and then think of all of these in the context of the larger world we live in.
The Meitheal group are very proud of their achievement so far to reach the final, and are hoping to return with even more good new next week.
The Waltons Music for Schools Competition is a non-profit national event celebrating music in Irish schools. All primary and post-primary schools recognised by the Department of Education and Skills in the Republic of Ireland are eligible to enter, and over the past five years, schools from every county in Ireland have taken part.
The objective of the Competition is to promote the enormous benefits of creative music making for young people, and it annually awards €10,000 worth of musical instruments and equipment as an incentive for schools to develop their existing music programmes or create new programmes and make music accessible to all.
This year’s Finalists Concert adjudicators are Deborah Kelleher, Director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and Riverdance composer Bill Whelan. The First, Second and Third Prize winners in each category (Primary and Post-Primary) will be announced at the end of the concert and will win €3,000, €1,500 and €500 worth of vouchers respectively in each category, for musical instruments and equipment from Waltons Music. In all, €10,000 worth of prizes will be awarded.
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