The Royal Irish Academy of Music is delighted to announce that we have been awarded €143,000 in cash and consultancy support from the Rethink Ireland Disability Participation and Awareness Fund 3.0. This generous funding will support the development of When Forests Sing, a pioneering new co-creative music project. When Forests Sing is an ambitious bio/diverse opera that will be developed through a series of inclusive workshops led by renowned composer Karen Power. The project places collaboration at its core, bringing together participants to work in an open, equal, and shared creative environment.
Participants will include members of the Open Youth Orchestra of Ireland (OYOI), Ireland’s first national inclusive ensemble for young musicians with disabilities and students from the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Together, they will form a large-scale ensemble incorporating singers, technological instrumentalists, choirs, and immersive soundscapes drawn from natural forest environments. This initiative follows RIAM’s recent co-creative project, Sounding the Hidden, presented at the National Library of Ireland earlier this year. That project brought together individuals of diverse abilities to create and perform a new composition using ‘found sounds’ recorded onsite.
We extend our sincere thanks to Deirdre Mortell, Dr. Karen Galligan, Avery Milo Parducci, and the entire Rethink Ireland team, as well as to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, for their vision and support in making this important project possible. We also congratulate the 21 other recipient organisations who have been funded through this programme to deliver a rich variety of innovative projects supporting people living with disabilities.
You can find a full list of recipient awardees here.