When Nan Tom Teamín de Búrca wakes up with a sore throat, she knows it is usually Tuesday. During school term, that is. The previous night, she will have sung her heart out to young children who come to learn the rudiments of sean-nós in Spiddal, Co Galway.
"I love it," she says. "But I can be singing for three hours continuously, and so there's wear and tear on my own voice."
She starts her pupils young - as early as five years old - and there's always a few lollipops and milseáin to tempt them to return.
This weekend, de Búrca is many hundreds of miles away from her native Connemara, attending the Second International Voice Festival in the 745-year-old city of Lviv in the Ukraine. She is a special guest, along with music producer Mary McPartlan, and will perform with Khakasian and Tuvan throat singers at the Lviv Academy of Music.
The voice festival is focused on two vocal "phenomena", as McPartlan explains: poly-
phony, which is performed by several voices, and throat singing, practised in Russia, Croatia, Mongolia, Georgia and Bulgaria.
The Georgian polyphony involves seven male voices singing ancient Georgian "male" songs, while Dalmatian male singing involves six singers from the mountains of Croatia. Buddhist throat singers will also perform, this being "two voices in a quarter interval modulated in one person's throat", McPartlan says.
For de Búrca, it is a new experience. As a mother of four, and a full-time teacher of sean-nós in schools throughout Connemara, she has had her work cut out. However, she did attend a festival in Milwaukee, in the US, three years ago and found herself instructing 22 students, aged 16 to 60 - none of whom had a word of Irish.
"They were so interested, so keen to learn, and I taught them a good five or six songs, which they sang very well," she says.
She learned sean-nós at home from her parents, who never sang in public. There was an old gramophone in the house with two records by Sean MacDonnacha and Joe Heaney, and she also "soaked up" the music of Céilí House on the radio, before the days of Raidió na Gaeltachta. A pub on MacDara's island off Mace Head was known for its mighty sessions, and when she was older she went there.
She sang in her first competition when she was 14. Remembering the words was never difficult, she says: "It is like telling a story, and most of those stories are about love gone wrong, death or drowning."
With so many years of experience, she still allows herself to be "nervous for the first verse", and the more background noise the better ("it encourages me"). De Búrca went to London in 1978, and there was little demand for sean-nós there at the time. She still sang, mainly country and Irish. When she moved back from London to where she now lives, in Rusheenamanagh, near Carna, she took up where she had left off.
In 1988 and 2000, she won Corn Uí Riada, the most prestigious annual award for sean-nós singing. Her new album contains some of the great sean-nós songs, and has been released on the Cló Iar-Chonnachta label. She finds that she is no longer restrained by the strictures of competition.
"In the Oireachtas festival, you mustn't break the lines, you have to hold the notes and you have to have the breath of a donkey," she says. "I break the lines and the words, because that is how I heard it."
De Búrca will lead a master-class in sean-nós at the Lviv festival and tomorrow she will sing as a special guest at its closing concert in the city's 17th-century cathedral. The city's mixture of architectural styles provides a dramatic backdrop to the international event. It has belonged at different stages to the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Polish kingdom, the Russian empire and the USSR, and is on the UNESCO world heritage site list.
Lorna Siggins
Nan Tom Teamín de Búrca and Mary McPartlan are travelling with assistance from Údarás na Gaeltachta and the Arts Council. The Second International Voice Festival finishes on July 1st