Jessie Grimes is happier than she has ever been. Brimming with energy after a 10km run and an ice bath, the Dublin-born clarinettist and presenter is reflecting, from the French Alps, on ditching the material things in life and taking a new approach.
“Me and my partner are on a weird nomadic quest. We sold our flat in London 18 months ago and we’re looking for the perfect place to buy,” she says.
Having spent a life-changing six weeks exploring Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Grimes and her spouse, Brogen Murphy, who is a children’s author, have decided to live life on their own terms.
“Sometimes we’re gambling down to the wire with where we’re going to be,” she says. “We kind of float, and it’s all about wanting to be somewhere that’s as connected to nature – and real wild nature – as possible. It’s helped me overcome a bit of anxiety. Now it’s, like, ‘Well, I don’t actually need that many things’ and there’s a lightening of it.”
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A self-proclaimed overachiever, Grimes is kept busy as an artist-in-residence at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, as part of its learning and participation programme. Pointing to her fellow NCH artists-in-residence – Bryce Dessner of The National and the mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught – Grimes says she is optimistic about the future of the music industry, as community work is being given its moment in the spotlight.
“They’re taking the community, learning and participation side of all the work they do in the concert hall and holding it up as equally valid and important as somebody super famous from a rock band or an incredible opera singer. They’re saying this work is as valuable. So that’s been really beautiful, and I think across the industry people have been really excited about what that means, particularly for Ireland.”
Having spent the guts of 25 years immersed in conservatoire culture – beginning at the age of 10, at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, and teaching at her alma mater, the Royal College of Music in London, until late 2023 – Grimes only recently started to feel comfortable in her own skin.
“I’m not a terribly formal person,” she says. “I never got on as well coming on stage as Jessica and playing my clarinet as I did relaxing, being Jessie, expressing myself with my own fashion ... talking directly to the audience. The minute I started doing that, even as a clarinettist, I felt like there was more integrity in how I was performing.
“It’s a tough place to grow up. I can look at it now and see how, as a queer person particularly, there was still an attitude and an energy around that wasn’t overt but was just, ‘You’re a bit different’.”
Having battled with self-doubt for much of her career, Grimes now feels more at ease, allowing herself to embrace the parts of her identity she once thought did not fit the mould.
Remembering these early years, she says: “I definitely think I was coming up in a time when actually there was an undercurrent of inequality that was still there ... I didn’t realise why I was working as hard as I was. I auditioned for every conservatoire in the UK to do a master’s because I thought I wasn’t good enough.
“It’s taken a really long time to step into my own self and be, like, ‘Maybe you might be all right at this – actually, you’re pretty good at all this’. I think a lot of that comes from being a woman, being queer and trying to figure out all of that stuff at the same time.
“I feel terribly uncomfortable wearing a dress. The fact that I wore a dress for all those years now boggles my mind. I was afraid for a long time to be queer in those spaces, because they were occupied by wealthy, upper-class white people. Even, actually, being Irish in the UK was difficult in that environment.”
Inspired by her own struggles with anxiety and self-criticism, Grimes decided to focus on the topic as a postgraduate. “Classical music is riddled with perfectionism. Even my master’s thesis was about perfectionism and anxiety ... because I was riddled with it myself and I just wanted to understand more about it,” she says.
This self-scrutiny manifested itself in the form of a diary that Grimes kept. “I used to write a journal after every performance and I would think about what I’d eaten before, how I’d slept; I’d analyse how I performed; I’d be reflecting on it. I was vegetarian at the time – I’m now vegan – but I was, like, ‘Maybe you should have a steak before the next performance’.”
Making the orchestral-music scene more accessible is a large part of what motivates Grimes in her work. She likes to think of her main responsibility as “holding space”, a concept that has taken on a life of its own after the fever dream that was the partnership of actors Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande on the press tour for the musical fantasy film Wicked.
“I was obsessed with that press tour,” Grimes says, laughing. “I thought it was beautiful and bizarre and compelling ... My brother sent me that meme of holding space with the fingers.”
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So what does holding space mean for a presenter like Grimes? “For me, the idea of it is that in most of these places I’m kind of the one in charge of holding the energy of the room, whether I’m in a workshop with 10 people or it’s a concert hall with 2,500.
“The job is to sort of feel out into the room and feel where everyone is. I think it’s one of my special skills that I can do that ... I know when somebody’s checked out, when somebody’s not feeling good. When it’s my job to hold the space, it’s my job to make sure everybody feels included and comfortable and okay.”
Having recently been diagnosed with otosclerosis, which has caused “about 70 per cent hearing loss in one ear”, Grimes has had to navigate personally uncharted territory as a musician.
I read a load of Beethoven’s letters and diaries, and he basically went through the same thing. It’s weird to read him write about this frustration
“We’d escaped to the west of Ireland during the first time you could travel during lockdown, and I love swimming – I’ll throw myself into any body of water. I spent probably more time in the sea than I did on the land. I came back at the end of 2021 thinking, ‘Oh I’ve got all this water in my ear’. There was all this clicking. Any loud sound was horrendous.”
In preparing for some of her concerts, she found solace in resonating with a great musician’s experience.
“What’s really interesting is, for one of the symphony shorts recently, I read a load of Beethoven’s letters and diaries, and he basically went through the same thing. It’s weird to read him write about this frustration.”
Now equipped with a hearing aid, Grimes says she is coping well with the change. She saw the “profoundly moving” Paraorchestra in action when the internationally acclaimed ensemble, whose members are disabled and are non-disabled, took to the NCH stage in late November. Grimes joined the group’s assistant music director, the violinist Siobhan Clough, in giving a preconcert talk.
First up in Grimes’s packed calendar for the new year is a family concert offering an exciting new take on Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, featuring shadow puppetry by Maeve Clancy. This performance will be closely followed by Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which will allow children in the audience to feel up close to the instruments thanks to the camera crew on hand.
“The most thrilling thing, I think, is being right inside the orchestra, so they aim to make it feel like every member of the audience can be right inside and see and hear everything that’s happening.”
Jessie Grimes presents Peter and the Wolf and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on February 9th
