Charleville (and Enya) row in behind Musica Fusion group to nurture new talent
Susie Butler and Musica Fusion, a community orchestra based in Charleville, Co Cork
Susie Butler, co-founder of Musica Fusion, a community orchestra based in Charleville, Co Cork, says the spring return of GAA activities creates a predicament for musicians.
“We concede defeat by April every year," she says. "We take a back seat, maybe working with quartets and we usually keep the junior orchestra going because they’re not as intertwined in sports as the senior orchestra.”
But Butler is not complaining. The orchestra, which she founded with her musician daughter Sophie Butler in 2015, works hard and has been selected to perform at the National Concert Hall (NCH) on February 11 as part of the Irish Association of Youth Orchestras’ (IAYO) annual festival.
“At the end of the day, we are in a rural area and the GAA is very important. The National Concert Hall is our Croke Park. Not every child is sporty so it’s wonderful to give them an opportunity to do a different team activity,” she says.
Butler, who has played in various rock bands over the years and has a degree in business, is clearly enterprising. As well as co-founding the orchestra for 5 to 18 year olds, she founded the Musica Fusion school with her daughter in the north Cork town.
While she runs the school as a business, the orchestra is a separate entity and is a registered charity. She says she ends up spending more time running the orchestra than the school but the two are interlinked.
Because she wanted music lessons for her two other children who are a lot younger than Sophie, Butler had no option other than sending them to Cork or Limerick.
“I thought it was ridiculous that in this day and age, you had to travel to a city to get cello and double bass lessons.”
When the school opened in a former cinema in Charleville, with the help of a loan and a lot of enthusiasm, there were four teachers. There are now twenty teachers and 350 students. The teachers mainly come from the MTU Cork School of Music.
Sophie Butler was able to co-opt these teachers as she knew them from studying for her music degree there. Some of the teachers are still working at the school, seven years later, including the vice-principal, Aisling Lineen.
The school includes a concert hall, with an audience capacity of 300. It is only now nearing completion. The orchestra raised funds for the stage at the school.
Some 90% of the Musica Fusion orchestra members come from the school. It is a synergy that has brought great benefits to Charleville, broadening the horizons of the young people.
“Open to everyone, regardless of ability, disability and socio-economic background, we don’t charge the orchestra members. We ask them to make a weekly voluntary contribution of €3 if they can.
“Most of them do and we suggest they do little jobs at home to earn the money. The orchestra belongs to the members. There are 85 to 90 members. The parents are very involved also.”
For the NCH performance, the orchestra will premiere its composition entitled Through the Ages. Two years in the making, it is a musical interpretation of our journey from birth to death. It is based on a poem composed at the Musica Fusion school’s creative writing class.
It was then passed to the orchestra’s composition group under the guidance of Sophie Butler who works as a double bassist in Glasgow. The orchestra members met Sophie through Zoom, working out motifs and musical passages.
Miriam Ball, the school’s performing arts teacher, worked with the narrators of the poem. The hip hop teacher, Eileen Barrett, choreographed the movements for her dancers. It is a four movement piece that is eight minutes long. It will be performed by seventy musicians from the orchestra.
Butler is grateful for the support and encouragement shown to the orchestra. The esteemed Irish conductor, Robert Houlihan, has been a great mentor.
“He loves what we’re doing, bringing music to a rural area that wouldn’t normally have many opportunities.”
Local businesses in Charleville are supportive. And in something of a coup, one of the orchestra members wrote to the singer/songwriter Enya, asking for financial help for the orchestra.
“We run a number of scholarships. But because of lockdowns, we had no way of keeping the scholarships going as we had no funds coming in.”
Enya’s generous donation allowed the scholarships to continue for the last two years. “And we were able to purchase percussion equipment.” With that kind of goodwill, Musica Fusion seems to have hit on a winning formula.
