Our 30th anniversary celebration is an important opportunity to reflect on the many memories and highlights accumulated over the years, and to look ahead to our ambitious and creative expansion.
West Cork Music began in the mid-’90s as an idea in the head of Francis Humphrys – farmer and founder of the renowned West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Since then, it has grown into a suite of 3 world-class festivals, supported by formidable education and outreach activities.The West Cork Literary Festival and Masters of Tradition were spin-offs from the Chamber Festival, and its innovation has never stopped!
Our fringe festivals continue to grow, reaching out across West Cork’s peninsulas and islands. Our year-round concert series is expanding and thriving too, and our first autumn festival in sight….
It’s clear that imaginative expansion is part of West Cork Music’s DNA as well as its strategic plan!
Throughout the lifetime of West Cork Music, founder Francis Humphrys has had an ambition to create a permanent year-round home for the arts in Bantry. Over recent years, those ideas have started to take shape.
‘West Cork Music’s vision for the next generation is for a truly great and acoustically sophisticated
Music Centre that will serve as a world-class venue, a community hub, a music teaching resource
for Bantry and West Cork, and a home of our own for the long-term sustainability of our festivals.’
Francis Humphrys, CEO, West Cork Music
A state-of-the-art 250-seater auditorium will support access to great performances for our local community, as well as provide a stable home for West Cork Music. Small enough to retain WCM’s intimate atmosphere, but large enough to grow our audiences, it will create vital knock-on benefits for our local and regional economies.
We will, of course, continue to use much-loved local venues during festival periods. But, with our own spaces, we can make our events accessible to all in a way that simply isn’t possible in heritage venues. And we can channel the time we spend on logistics into programming and outreach for the benefit of all of our audiences, local and world-wide.
An education hub, alongside the venue, will create space to expand the innovative masterclass programme which has been a core part of West Cork Music’s work since the festivals began.
The hub will create opportunities for rehearsal and performance across artistic genres. It will also generate routes for musicians to progress from beginner level to world-class standards, as West Cork Music builds on its partnerships with wonderful music educators in our area and our rich international network.
The hub project reflects WCM’s deep commitment to maximising the potential of young people, our community, and the arts, and it will help to create a fantastic quality of life in Bantry, alongside the town’s planned sports and marine activity hubs.
In recent years, great progress has been made towards realising Francis’ dream to create a permanent home for the festivals and the arts in the heart of Bantry. And our plans have been recognised as a catalyst project for West Cork in a range of public strategies, in recognition of their importance for our community and our region.
A site has been secured next to Bantry Library, where Biggs’ supermarket currently stands.
And detailed designs are almost ready to submit for planning permission, prepared by the award-winning, Dublin-based team at McCullough Mulvin Architects.
MMA were appointed after a rigorous international design competition, and they are hugely supportive of our project and attentive to our needs. Their research has even involved a mini-tour of world-class international venues in the company of sound engineers who have been loyal fans of WCM for decades!
Our progress to this point was enabled by the generous support of Armen Vartien and Candice Foss, as well as other kind donors, far and near. The Chamber Music Festival’s 30th birthday finds us at a point where a once-in-a-generation transformation is imminent!
To mark 30 years of the Chamber Music Festival, we invite you to join us in moving forward our plans to create an arts venue and education hub here in Bantry.
Ways you can show support:
1. Give a gift to help us build a world-class arts venue and education hub – your generosity will have a lasting impact.
2. Become a committed donor and provide ongoing support for the development of our new arts venue, ensuring its success for future generations.
On the occasion of the 30th Chamber Music Festival, your gift is an opportunity to acknowledge the huge contribution the festival has already made to the arts and our community, and to your own life. And your generosity will bring us one step closer to securing a promising future for West Cork Music, its audiences, performers, and students for another 30 years and many, many more after that!
To donate to the West Cork Music project, you can use the dedicated links at Bantry Music Centre and on our American Friends of West Cork Music sites.
DOUBLE YOUR DONATION
Thanks to the support of a generous donor, gifts to the project during the West Cork Chamber Music Festival will be matched to a total value of €75k, to bring us closer to our goal!
For more information about the venue project, contact our Venue Development Manager, Siobhán Burke, or chat to her at the festival.
Thank you for your support and welcome to our 30th Chamber Music Festival!
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