Dr. Diane Daly

Professor Diane Daly is a violinist, educator and innovator.

She made her debut as a soloist with the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra at the age of 13, and has toured internationally as a soloist and chamber musician with ensembles including The Academy of St Martin in the Fields. She has been a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra since 1997 and is in demand as a chamber musician, director and improvisor at prestigious festivals at home and abroad. She enjoys devising her own work, and has been invited to direct world premieres of works by many leading Irish composers including Sam Perkins, Linda Buckley and Deirdre Gribbin. In other genres she has performed and recorded alongside many of the biggest names in rock and leads her own gypsy jazz trio, a regular fixture at Django sur Lennon Gypsy Jazz Festival.

Diane has always run a parallel career as educator and community musician. She founded and directed the Arts Council funded innovative Féile Eile Arts Festival for children and was Artistic Director of ‘Music Factory’, the Irish Chamber Orchestra’s multi-disciplinary summer camp from 2008-2016.

She founded two successful string schools in the mid-West and has extensive experience teaching at all levels. Her teaching focus is on the development of the whole musician as a creative artist, fostering joy-filled music making, autonomy and self-expression.  She is a qualified Dalcroze Eurhythmics teacher and in recent years became Europe’s first accredited string playing Body-Mapper. 

In 2019 she completed an Irish Research Council scholarship funded PhD, exploring the impacts of Dalcroze and related techniques on her professional performance practice. From this research emerged a number of insights and new approaches that became Creative Embodied String Performance (CESP). This incorporates exploring fresh approaches to devising, preparing and performing repertoire. CESP has been successfully piloted with a range of international student and professional ensembles, and her work has been published in numerous prestigious academic journals, including the International Journal of Music Education and Music Education Research. In 2022, her doctoral research was awarded the inaugural Aloys Fleischmann prize for outstanding practice based research.

Before taking up her new role as Head of Strings at RIAM, Diane was the Course Director of the MA in Classical String Performance at the University of Limerick, teaching Community Music, Creative Composition, Performance Psychology, Kodály and Improvisation. Over this time, she devised a number of exciting and innovative projects both in Ireland and across Europe, developing the concepts of embodiment, presence, creativity and connection. Diane founded the ICO Academy Projects, creating national and international annual chamber music projects for postgraduate students. 

ICO Academy Projects Playlist.