May 26th - 27th

Galway Early Music Festival 2023

Crossroads

Mark Keane

Artist Biography

Dr Mark Keane is the founder and director of Vox Orbis. A music graduate of Trinity College Dublin and TU Dublin Conservatory, he studied organ with Peter Sweeney and conducting with Ite O'Donovan. He has since completed a Masters degree in Chant and Ritual Studies at the University of Limerick, and also holds diplomas in organ performance and conducting from Trinity College London, Royal School of Music, Royal College of Organists and London College of Music. He completed doctoral studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music/Trinity College Dublin under Blanaid Murphy and Denise Neary. 

A former organ scholar of the National Cathedral of St. Patrick in Dublin, Mark is now Organist and Director of Music at Tuam Cathedral, Co Galway, and Head of Music at Galway Community College. Previous appointments include organist at the Church of Christ the King, Salthill; director of Tribal Chamber Choir; and the Galway Choral Association. He has conducted many orchestras including the ConTempo Orchestra and DLR Opera Orchestra (Ireland), the Charnwood Symphony Orchestra (UK), the Czech Virtuoso Chamber Orchestra (Austria & Poland) and the Wiener Domorchester (Austria).

More recently Mark has performed John Amner's Sacred Hymnes for Voyces and Vyols (1615) with the internationally acclaimed viol consort - Phantasm. In 2019 he released a recording of the complete domestic music of Amner with the Dublin Consort Singers and Fretwork viol consort on the Rubicon Classics. The album has received favourable reviews in Gramophone, The Sunday Times, Early Music, BBC Music Magazine and Diapason.
Mark enjoys a solo organ performance career, which has seen him play in St. Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney; King's Chapel and Trinity Church, Boston; St Thomas Church, New York; Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Newark; St. James' Cathedral, Toronto; and Westminster Abbey, London. Awards for organ performance include the Senior Organ Competition and the Stanford Prize at the Dublin Feis Ceoil; the Actors Church Union Award for Advanced Organ Performance at the TU Dublin Conservatory; and he was a semi-finalist in the 2005 Dublin International Organ Festival.

Mark is also in demand as an accompanist, repetiteur and vocal coach, and has worked with many choirs, ensembles and soloists including Cantando, TU Dublin Choral Society and Chamber Choir, Galway Baroque Singers and Sunus Chamber Choir, Dublin Choral Foundation, Resurgam and Munster Rugby Supporters Choir. He has adjudicated at various choral and music festivals in Ireland including the Limerick Choral Festival and Feis Shligigh.

In 2000, Mark was awarded the Sean O'Riada Trophy for an original composition in the Irish language at the Cork International Choral Festival. His setting of Salm 94 was premiered by the Galway Boy Singers, who also won the National Competition for Youth Choirs under his direction the same year. Recent compositions for mixed voice choirs include Tar anuas an Spioraid Naoimh, Bethlehem, and the setting of Eileen Carney-Hulme's poem Belonging. Mark's compositions are published by Cailíno Music Publishers in Ireland. He is the editor of The Oxford Book of Upper-Voice Polyphony published by Oxford University Press (2021), together with a selection of octavos from this anthology.

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