NELL KANE was once so well known in Dublin music-making that, just to test her popularity, her father sent her a Christmas card addressed simply: “Miss Nell Kane, Dublin”. It arrived safely and promptly. When Nell opened it, the card simply read: “Ha, ha”.
For decades, she played a key role in music teaching and playing in Dublin, and had her own orchestra. She gave up private music teaching only five years ago. Nell recently celebrated her 91st birthday and has the clearest and most accurate memories of her time in music.
She was born in Wicklow town and her family moved to Dublin when she was three. By the age of six, she was starting the piano and at nine she began playing the violin. Her mother, Margaret, was very musically inclined and gave her plenty of encouragement. Her father, Joe, also loved music; by day, he worked in CIÉ, which is why the family home for years was in Kilmainham, close to the railway works in Inchicore. She and her ensemble, which later evolved into her orchestra, won the Lord Mayor’s prize in the Father Mathew Feis three years in a row before they decided they should give someone else a chance to win.
After Nell completed her music training and got her teaching diploma in music at the then School of Music in Chatham Row, she began working there part-time, going on to teach there for 47 years.
She has the fondest memories of the school, which had started as the Municipal School of Music in 1890. It has been in Chatham Row since 1904 and is now the Conservatory of Music and Drama in Dublin Institute of Technology. “Michael McNamara, the then principal, was a great favourite,” Nell says, “‘Mr Mac’ to me and everyone else”.
Always a free spirit, in between her teaching sessions at the school of music she taught in many schools, such as Sion Hill in Blackrock, Muckross Park in Donnybrook and the Cross and Passion College in Kilcullen, Co Kildare. She also did much music work for the Department of Education.
At one stage, she was asked by the Christian Brothers in Crumlin to start music lessons there. She told the brother in charge that it would cost him money for her fees and all the musical instruments he’d need to buy, but he replied that the school was already so much in debt for its new building, that a little more wouldn’t matter.
About 60 years ago, her ensemble evolved into the Nell Kane Orchestra, which at its height had about 30 players. The idea was to mix very experienced players with relative novices. Nell says that they never got a penny for their performances; all the money they raised was for charity.
Rehearsals were held every Saturday in the studios of the Desmond Donegan Ballet School in Parnell Square. The orchestra played at many venues, such as the Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dawson Street and the Aberdeen Hall in the Gresham Hotel, and at many hospitals. It also broadcast frequently on Radio Éireann, in the days when the studios were still at the top of the GPO. The music was very varied – from light music such as Tales from the Vienna Woods and the Gypsy Baron to works by Beethoven and Elgar, her own favourite classical composers.
The orchestra brought another benefit too: a few romances started among the players.
Nell toured extensively in the US, with the St James’s Choir and Orchestra led by Fr John O’Brien. She reckons that the musical life in Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s was even better than it is now, though people now have better venues to attend, such the National Concert Hall, whereas in her heyday it was the Phoenix Hall and then the St Francis Xavier Hall off the top of Gardiner Street.
Nell’s star pupils include John Sheahan of the Dubliners, whose playing of his well-known composition The Marino Waltz must owe something to Nell, because it was she who taught him violin. Another pupil was John Kinsella, now a leading composer. Many of her former pupils went on to become teachers, so the teaching tradition continues to be regenerated.
As if all that wasn’t enough, Nell was active in charity work, first with the Red Cross, then with the St Vincent de Paul Society. She remembers going to visit people in top-floor flats in the old tenements in York Street and being given a lighted newspaper to see her way back down the stairs, so that she could avoid the rats and mice. In another house she visited, the man of the house had TB and the family were so poor that they had only old boxes to sit on in the livingroom.
After she gave up teaching music, Nell found another passion – painting. She is still very active in religious affairs in Wicklow town, as president of the local Dominican laity and with a group that visits Medjugorje. For the past 30 years she has lived in the original family home in Wicklow town, which was fortunately kept on. She rarely goes to Dublin these days and says that everything you could possibly need is available in and around Wicklow town. She has a wide circle of relations and friends so there is never a dull moment.
“Once you have good health and good friends, that’s all you need,” she says. “I completely forget my age. You just get old, but I never think old.”