Diane Daly, Violin

Professor Diane Daly is a violinist, educator and innovator.

She made her debut as a soloist with the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra at the age of 13 and has toured internationally as a soloist and chamber musician with ensembles, including The Academy of St Martin in the Fields. She has been a member of the Irish Chamber Orchestra since 1997 and is in demand as a chamber musician, director, and improviser at prestigious festivals at home and abroad. She enjoys devising her own work and has been invited to direct world premieres of works by many leading Irish composers, including Sam Perkins, Linda Buckley, and Deirdre Gribbin. In other genres, she has performed and recorded alongside many of the biggest names in rock and leads her own gypsy jazz trio, a regular fixture at Django sur Lennon Gypsy Jazz Festival.

Diane has always run a parallel career as an educator and community musician. She founded and directed the Arts Council-funded innovative Féile Eile Arts Festival for children and was the Artistic Director of ‘Music Factory’, the Irish Chamber Orchestra’s multi-disciplinary summer camp from 2008-2016. She founded two successful string schools in the mid-West and has extensive experience teaching at all levels. Her teaching focus is on the development of the whole musician as a creative artist, fostering joy-filled music making, autonomy, and self-expression. She is a qualified Dalcroze Eurhythmics teacher and, in recent years, became Europe’s first accredited string-playing Body-Mapper.

In 2019, she completed an Irish Research Council scholarship-funded PhD, developing the concepts of embodiment, presence, creativity, and connection in string playing. Her work has been published in numerous prestigious academic journals, including the International Journal of Music Education and Music Education Research. In 2022, her doctoral research was awarded the inaugural Aloys Fleischmann prize for outstanding practice-based research. Before taking up her new role as Head of Strings at RIAM, Diane was the Course Director of the MA in Classical String Performance at the University of Limerick, teaching Community Music, Creative Composition, Performance Psychology, Kodály, and Improvisation.

Links to Selected Performances.

(2018) Dance of Shadows 3 min edit

(2019) The Copy and the Original by Sam Perkin

(2017) Fleischmann in Java

(2021) Visualisation by Sam Perkin

(2021) Obsession by Ysaÿe

(2020) ‘Songs my mother taught me’ by Diane Daly

(2020) Exploding Stars by Linda Buckley

(2019) Irish Chamber Orchestra Albinoni’s Adagio

Links to Selected Publications

Daly, D.K. (2022) ‘Creativity, autonomy and Dalcroze Eurhythmics: An arts practice exploration’, International Journal of Music Education, 40(1), pp. 105–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/02557614211028600

Daly, D.K. (2022) ‘Embodied Pedagogy for Strings: Preparing and Performing Ysaÿe’s Solo Violin Sonata no. 2 op. 27 – A Journey of Unexpected Discoveries’, Music Education Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2022.2054963

Daly, D.K. (2021) ‘Playing with the Past: An Autoethnography’, Qualitative Inquiry, 28(3–4), pp. 353–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211026897

Daly, D.K. (2021) Unearthing the Artist: An Autoethnographic Investigation. The Qualitative Report, 26(8), 2467-2478. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2021.4796

Daly, Diane. “A Dance of Shadows through Arts Practice Research.” Le Rythme, (2019): 141-150. Available at: https://www.fier.com/uploads/pdf/le-rythme-2019.pdf