The Fulbright Experience

Elizabeth Dyer

Fr Tom Stack

Steve Powers

Roger Rosenblatt

Oscar Wallace Greenberg

Molly Hester

Sinéad Ní Mhaoilmhichíl

John O'Loughlin Kennedy

Gerald Peregrine

Mel Mercier

Thérèse Fahy

An eight part series about the impact of getting a Fulbright scholarship on the lives and careers of Irish people who went to study in the U.S and Americans who came here.

Programme 1: Saturday February 21st - Thérèse Fahy

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Professor of Piano and Director of Chamber Music at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, describes how her own experience of being a Fulbright Scholar in the 1980s has changed her life.

Programme 2: Saturday February 28th - Steve Powers

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This week we hear from American artist Steve Powers, who started his career as a graffiti artist but these days sticks to less illegal art work. We also hear from Irish clarinettist Paul Roe who went on a Fulbright scholarship to study Klezmer music in New York.

Programme 3: Saturday March 7th - Judith Coe

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American musician Judith Coe admits that her fascination with Ireland goes back to seeing the film 'Ryan's Daughter' as a 13-year old. She is puzzled by the resistance to jazz which she finds in Ireland but one exception to that is guitarist Patrick Groenland, a young Irish musician who has taken a circuitous route from Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and classical guitar to, finally, jazz music. He is currently on a Fulbright scholarship to study jazz at Berklee College of Music in Boston, the biggest music school in the world.

Programme 4: Saturday March 14th - Roger Rosenblatt &
Oscar Wallace Greenberg

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We hear from two Americans from very different fields and with very different experiences of Ireland. Writer Roger Rosenblatt was just setting out on his career when he spent a year here over forty years ago, while physics professor Oscar Wallace Greenberg had had decades of experience of lecturing and research before spending some time here at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

Programme 5: Saturday March 21st- Molly Hester

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Molly Hester is an American in her 20s who has no Irish connections in her family at all, but who is currently studying for a Master's degree taught through Irish at NUI Galway. She could not have foretold how an initial interest in bluegrass banjo would lead her to where she is now. Along the way, she takes up the uilleann pipes, chucks in her chemistry studies at Harvard, and features as a guest on Raidió na Gaeltachta.

In 2007, Sinéad Ní Mhaoilmhichíl was one of the first people to get a Fulbright scholarship to go and teach Irish at an American university. Her students were in for a shock, especially as some of them did not even realise that Irish was a language. And Sinéad was in for a shock when she realised how little they knew about Ireland. She, too, ends up on the radio, on a programme on NPR (National Public Radio).

Programme 6 : Saturday March 28th

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In the early 1960s, John O'Loughlin Kennedy was a young business manager working in Dublin. When he got his opportunity to go on a Fulbright scholarship to California, JFK was in the White House and it was a time of immense hope. He was blown away by the 'can do' attitude he found in the US, which was in such contrast to the closed society he had come from in Ireland. John is a founder of Concern, now a major international aid organisation, and he believes that Concern would never have existed if he had not had his Fulbright experience.

Gerald Peregrine is a young Irish cellist. He comes from a musical family - his mother is violinist Sheila O'Grady - so it was perhaps inevitable that he would follow a career in music. His Fulbright scholarship took him to Indiana to study with internationally renown cellist Janos Starker. He was in the US on September 11th 2001 and saw how local people reacted in this small, mid west town. Since his return to Ireland, he and two fellow musicians have set up a trio called Ensemble Avalon. They held their first winter chamber festival in Wexford in November 2008 and plan to make this an annual event.

Programme 7: Saturday April 4th

In the seventh programme in the series we hear from two Irish traditional musicians. Bodhrán and bones player Mel Mercier discovered world percussion music when he went to California at the end of the 1980s. More recently, uilleann piper Jimmy O'Brien Moran spent time in Boston studying some rare manuscripts of Irish music.

Programme 8:

Fr Tom Stack, recently retired and promoted to Monsignor, was mid way through his career as a priest when awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 1985. He spent a year at Harvard finding it quite a challenge to get back into formal, academic study of theology.

He also studied the religious dimension of the work of Patrick Kavanagh, which led to an invitation to publish an anthology of his poetry. Tom Stack's 'cardinal protector' while at Harvard was Seamus Heaney, although that turned out to be a mixed blessing.
Elizabeth Dyer is a singer, conductor and composer, mostly of religious music, born in Texas who came to Ireland in 2005 on a quest to find the music scores of the long lost musical genre of Jesuit college drama. In this programme she describes the thrill of staging a production of a work which has not been heard for 300 years.

A Rockfinch production for RTE lyricfm made with the support of the Sound & Vision Broadcasting Funding Scheme, a Broadcasting Commission of Ireland initiative
Producer: Claire Cunningham
Sound Supervision: Adrian Cunningham