2007 Instructors
Kevin Rowsome
Kevin Rowsome started playing the uilleann pipes at the age of six years. He took his first lessons from his grandfather Leo and also learned from his father Leon. During his teenage years Kevin played clarinet and saxophone with the Artane Boys band.
Kevin gained public recognition when he won first prize at the Oireachtas festival, and is widely regarded as one of today's finest uilleann pipers.
Kevin has vast experience as a performer and instructor of the pipes. He has performed extensively and has been staff instructor at a number of Irish music festivals throughout Europe and America. As well as his own debut recording "The Rowsome Tradition", five generations of uilleann piping in 1999, Kevin has recorded and performed with various artists.
Kevin has also gained some recognition as a composer. He won the prestigious Cuisle Ceoil an Bhlascaoid (the musical pulse of the Blasket islands) competition in 2006.
Louise Mulcahy
“Precision, energy, expertise, and invention all rolled together”, is how Irish Echo reviewer Earle Hitchner described the playing of Louise Mulcahy on the recent Clo Iar-Chonnachta release, “Notes from the Heart.”
From Abbeyfeale, Co. Limerick, Louise is a well-established performer and tutor on both uilleann pipes and flute, having taught on a number of occasions at Augusta Irish Week in the United States as well as at the Willie Clancy Summer School.
Alongside two highly-regarded
album releases with father, Mick, and sister, Michelle, Louise appeared
a number of years ago on Na Piobairi Uilleann’s compilation of young pipers
entitled “A New Dawn”.
Bill Ochs
New York piper Bill Ochs has been teaching the pipes for more than 30 years. He learned to play from master pipers Andy Conroy, Pat Mitchell, and Tom Standeven in Ireland and the United States. Ochs's piping studies in Ireland were supported by a 1976 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His piping and tin whistle playing can be heard on the Rounder CD Light Through The Leaves.
Bill's performing credits include playing for José Quintero's Broadway production of A Touch of the Poet, Pilobolus Dance Company's Broadway début, the soundtrack for Bob Rafelson's film Mountains of the Moon and the première of Wind by Eiko and Koma at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. He was also piper in the original touring lineup of The Green Fields of America, which included Liz Carroll, Jack and Charlie Coen, Michael Flatley, Sean McGlynn and Mick Moloney. Bill is also an accomplished whistle and flute player. He has been called a "central figure in the renaissance of the tin whistle" by National Public Radio's All Things Considered and "the leading tin whistle teacher in North America" by New York's Irish Voice newspaper. He is author of The Clarke Tin Whistle handbook, now in its seventeenth printing with over 235,000 copies in print.
Jerry O'Sullivan
Born in New York City to an Irish-American mother and a father from Dublin, Ireland, Jerry first learned to play the Scottish highland pipes. During summer visits to family in Dublin, he learned the uilleann pipes from listening and asking questions to experienced players such as Peter Carberry, Matt Kiernan, Dan Dowd, Peter McKenna, Fergus Finnegan, Mick O'Brien, Gay McKeon, and others. In New York, uilleann piper Bill Ochs was a major help and inspiration to Jerry. Jerry has appeared on more than 90 albums and has performed or recorded with artists such as The Boston Pops, Don Henley, Paul Winter, James Galway, Dolly Parton, The Colorado Symphony Orchestra, The Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Eileen Ivers, and many others. He has toured extensively in the United States and Europe and has even played as far afield as Japan and Israel. Jerry is a gifted ambassador of the uilleann pipes, maintaining the historic traditions and melodies of the instrument while expanding its range into new genres of music and media.
Benedict Koehler
Born in Boston, Benedict grew up listening to recordings of Irish traditional music sent over by his mother's family in Dublin. He took up the pipes in his twenties and has listened to and learned from a wide range of the older players, citing as particularly strong influences the stately musical tradition of East Galway and the complex and elegant piping style exemplified by the "gentlemen pipers" Seamus Ennis and Liam O'Flynn. These influences are evident in Benedict's graceful, lyrical style of playing.
Well known as an insightful and generous teacher, Benedict will be teaching beginning and intermediate piping workshops. He and his wife, harper/button accordionist Hilari Farrington, live in East Montpelier, Vermont where Benedict, in association with David Quinn, makes and restores uilleann pipes and continues to enhance his reputation as a superb reed maker.
Willie Kelly
Willie is a renowned Irish fiddler who was born in the Bronx and raised
in northern New Jersey. He was inspired to play Irish music after hearing
his Irish-born father and grandfather playing the fiddle at home. In his
teenage years, he studied under the highly acclaimed West-Limerick fiddler
and teacher Martin Mulvihill.
Willie is recognized as a master in the art of Irish fiddling and has performed
for the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and several other folk arts programs in
the U.S. and Canada. He teaches fiddle and uilleann pipes classes at his home
in Northern New Jersey and at Irish music summer schools in East Durham, New
York, and Elkins, West Virginia. His playing is featured on Mike Rafferty's 2001
recording, The Road From Ballinakill, which was rated as one of the
top 10 Irish music recordings of the year by the The Irish Echo newspaper.