A week long festival centred around the cello gets under way in Galway this weekend.
Organisers of Cellissimo have encouraged musicians to travel to the city by land and sea in an effort to reduce the event's carbon footprint.
The musicians’ experiences on the journey to the west of Ireland will inform a number of specially composed pieces which will be premiered at the festival.
The Songs of Travel project has involved a number of composers and performers travelling to several European cities, before making their way here by train and ferry.
Among them are Karmit Fadael, Killian White and Stephanie Dufresne.
They have spent the last few weeks on the move, until the conclusion of their journey to Ceannt Station in Galway.
While the 'slow travel’ approach allowed plenty of time to plan and discuss their project, all three found the experience a little more difficult than they initially thought it would be.
"The idea was that while I was traveling I would write a piece," said Karmit Fadael.
"First I went to Amsterdam, then I went to Vienna and then to Sweden and Norway, before I met Stephanie and Killian for stop offs in Brussels and Paris, and finally Galway," Ms Fadael said.
The plan to arrive with a finished piece of music "didn’t work out at all," she added.
"I realised the travelling was very tiring and didn’t give me the possibility to do as much work as I would have liked."
As the final touches are put to the scores she is composing, her colleagues say the project has opened their eyes to the different pressures of travelling by different means.
Choreographer Stephanie Defresne "had many beautiful moments" but described slow travel as tricky.
"I don’t know how people do it routinely. It’s harder than it looks," she said.
"There are delays, you book things, you’ve got to rearrange them but then you also have a degree of freedom and spontaneity with it."
In a way, that looseness and versatility also typifies the instrument at the centre of this week’s festival.
Anna Lardi CEO of Music for Galway, the local organisation running Cellissimo said the instrument has a huge appeal, which will be fully showcased over the next eight days.
"People just love it. It has a similar range to the human voice, it’s just a beautiful round tone, it’s gorgeous to look at, I think it’s gorgeous to look at a cellist playing the cello as well, and all of that makes it a very, very popular instrument."
Cellissimo runs at venues across Galway city and county until 26 May.
