Over the coming year, the students of UCD’s Trad Music Practices module will be going into the studio to record their very own CD of trad tunes and original compositions.

The CD will be recorded with special guest artists and it will feature new arrangements of traditional tunes and original compositions created by the students themselves, as well as a brand new work written especially for our students by trad music legend Dónal Lunny.

This CD will showcase the remarkable achievements of our students in the first two years of this new CFA module, and the finished product will be released to the world at a special launch event in April 2025.

This project has been supported with Public Engagement Funds from the Creative Futures Academy (CFA) – a groundbreaking partnership between three leading creative institutions – the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), University College Dublin (UCD), and the Institute of Art Design + Technology (IADT).

Dr. Peter Moran is Assistant Professor of Composition and Performance in the UCD School of Music where he teaches classical composition, songwriting, trad music practises, and Javanese gamelan. His original compositions have been performed across Europe, Asia and America, and released on Ergodos Records and Farpoint Recordings. He is the director of Ireland’s National Concert Hall Gamelan Orchestra, which he founded in 2014 when he arranged for the Sultan of Yogyakarta to present the gift of a new gamelan to the Irish people.

In 2022, he created UCD’s Trad Music Practices module with CFA Artist-in-Residence Dónal Lunny, featuring special guests such as Paddy Glackin and Zoë Conway. In this unique module, students are taught not only the traditional Irish repertoire, but also modern works by innovators in the genre, such as Lunny and Conway, and also music from related traditions such as the dance music of the Balkan region. Students are also guided in the composition of their own original works, and in creating new arrangements of traditional repertoire.