Are you interested in singing and the arts?
Would you like to be part of an adventurous choir with a big artistic vision?
Wildsong Ensemble is an experimental choir. We make our own music & performance through singing, improvising, and dreaming big. We welcome people of all ages, stripes & abilities, from complete beginners to professional singers & artists alike. There are no auditions. All you need is an open mind and a willingness to take a chance on your voice – whatever it may sound like.
At the heart of the choir is the belief that artistic expression is innate, and that our world needs more spaces where we can explore our artistry together: Wildsong Ensemble is one such space.
Weekly workshops take place on Wednesdays from 7-9pm in either Wexford town (the Wexford Arts Centre or the Creative Hub), or in different outdoor locations close to Wexford town when the weather is good.
Founded & led by artist & composer, Laura Hyland, in association with Wexford Arts Centre. Supported by The Arts Council.
We meet weekly for a two-hour session on Wednesday evenings from 7 – 9pm from January to May, and September to November inclusive.
Singing begins with the body. The first half hour of the workshop is dedicated to body, breath & listening exercises. Thereafter, we turn to our voices: how can we make and sustain sound in a physically comfortable & healthy way?
The next 45mins is dedicated to improvisation. By continually listening and responding to each other’s voices in different configurations (solos, duos, group improvisations) we embrace and refine our capacity to create our own music.
The last 45mins is dedicated to devising new work for performance. This could be developing ideas discovered through improvisation, looking at existing repertoire we might like to sing, or a combo of both.
Participants are welcome to come and simply enjoy singing and meeting like-minded people; there is no pressure to get involved in performance, or to practice anything at home between sessions.
Spring 2024: ObOpOnAw
We’ve been developing an exercise over years: basically singing One Note per breath on the vowel sound ‘Aw’.
The title ObOpOnAw is an acronym of ‘One Breath, One Pitch On Aw’.
Recently we’ve begun looking at how we might add further limitations to our improvisations so as to shape an improvised composition. We’ll be working on this a lot over the coming weeks, and looking at ways of creating graphic representations for the ‘rules’ we come up with.
Autumn 2023: Of Gods & Birds
Coincidentally, several of the rounds we were working with last Spring referenced either gods and/or birds.
And so we’re currently looking at these two ideas as symbols: what do they represent, generally speaking, in contemporary life? What do the represent or remind us of individually or privately? How do we tie these disparate elements together into a cohesive whole, reflective of our group?
Through discussion over the coming weeks we plan to do just that: find a way of tying together our individual and collective associations into an aesthetic experience we can share publicly, and allowing these associations to permeate our singing and improvisations with these cannons.
Spring 2023: Cannons in the Colfer Room
During our sessions in Kilmannon Ball Alley last Summer/Autumn we spent a lot of time playing with the echoes in this unusual acoustic space.
While we had hoped to develop a site-specific piece in the ball alley itself, inclement weather sent us back indoors, and so we’re currently meeting in the Billy Colfer room in Wexford Arts Centre each week.
We’ve taken the idea of the echo with us though, and we’ve been exploring it in more traditional musical terms through learning cannons or ’rounds’ (
Summer-Autumn 2022: Echoes in the Alley
We’re meeting outdoors at Kilmannon ball alley in Cleariestown for the forseeeable future, (as usual from 7-9pm on Wednesdays) where we’ll be taking full advantage of the unusual acoustics of this outdoor handball alley, and looking at how we might incorporate this into our next performance piece.
Google maps link:
Spring – Summer 2022: SeeSoo
Rehearsing our new piece, SeeSoo, which is based on an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses, for performance on June 16th Bloomsday event.
13th March 2024
ObOpOnAw | Of Gods & Birds
We’re very excited to be preparing two new pieces for performance over the coming weeks:
ObOpOnAw is an improvised composition developed over years.
It began as an exercise in which each singer chooses one pitch off the top of their heads and sings it for one, whole breath.It does not matter if the pitch clashes or harmonises with that of neighbouring singers: the pitch must be held regardless.
Over weeks and months of singing this exercise, Laura and participants have offered reflection on other attributes of singing that could be similarly ‘limited’, ultimately rendering an improvised composition, or a set of rules within which singers improvise.
A performance of the piece itself, alongside a graphic + verbal score will form the basis of our performance of this new work. Members of the public are welcome to take a printed score and join in with us if they so wish, or simply to listen.
Of Gods & Birds is a performance and an installation. it began when we started looking at cannons, and coincidently ended up choosing four, all of which referenced either gods or birds. This led to some discussion around what these entities represented or symbolsed to each of us individually, and also in more general cultural terms.
By bringing together the disparate elements emerging from these discussions, we’ve devised an installation comprising singing, video and origami.
7th February 2024
Spring Sessions 2024
We’re back after our Christmas break to resume our weekly sessions in the Billy Colfer room – kindly provided by Wexford Arts Centre.
We’ll be here each Wednesday until the end of April, and looking forward to sharing some new work in progress before we break again for the summer.
5th January 2023
Artist in the Community Project Award
We’re delighted to have received the Arts Council’s ‘Artist in the Community Project Award’, managed by Create, the national development agency for collaborative arts.
This will enable us to continue our weekly workshops and develop new work over the coming year.
A huge **THANK YOU** to our local Wexford Arts Centre and Wexford County council Arts Dept, both of whom have been incredibly supportive of Wildsong Ensemble since we began in 2022.
We’re very much looking forward to starting up our new sessions under this scheme – a little later than usual this year – beginning on Weds 12th of April 2023, and continuing on into the summer months.
20th August 2022
Autumn ’22: Hand Ball Alley Sessions
Having explored some beautiful outdoor spots around the county over the summer, we’ve settled on Kilmannonhand ball alley for the Autumn. The acoustics are great and it’s a nice quiet spot, reasonably close to town. We’ll reconvene there on Weds 31st of August for 8 weeks until Weds 26th October, 7-9pm (or at least until the weather breaks, in which case we’ll retire indoors at the Creative Hub again!) You can find Kilmannon hand ball alley here
18th June 2022
Summer ’22 Sessions
We’ll be taking to the great outdoors for the next few weeks for our summer sessions, from Weds 25th June through to Weds 27th July, 7.30-9pm. We’ll check out some different locations around the county. First up is the ruined church at Bannow Island; then some ball alleys! Keep an eye on our weekly posts to see locations.
15th March 2022
Welcome to Wildsong Ensemble!
Our first Wildsong Ensemble session takes place on Wednesday March 30th from 7-9pm at Dance Hub, Wexford. All welcome and no prior singing experience is required. Please have a look around the website for more info on who we are and what we do. We look forward to meeting you!
1st June 2022
Premiering ‘SeeSoo’ at Bloomsday Wexford
Bloomsday is an international annual event celebrating James Joyce’s seminal novel, Ulysses, and its everyman protagonist, Leopold Bloom, as he goes about his day in his home town of Dublin on June 16th, 1904. The book is first and foremost a celebration of a day in the life of an ordinary man, and gives a deeply empathetic and poignant account of his most intimate thoughts, fears, sorrows and hopes.
In keeping with this spirit, Wildsong Ensemble in association with Wexford Arts Centre present Wexford town’s first ever Bloomsday event.
Wildsong Ensemble will perform a new choral soundscape, SeeSoo, composed by Laura Hyland, which came about when Bloomsday 2020 happened to coincide with the choir’s weekly session: choir member, Jeni Roddy brought along an excerpt from Ulysses, which the choir used as the basis for vocal explorations for several months thereafter. Laura eventually set the words to music, taking the choir’s improvisations as a starting point.
To contextalise this new piece (our first one ever!) Laura & Wildsong Ensemble decided to build a whole Bloomsday event around it.
We open with Conversations on Joyce – an introduction to James Joyce by Frank Hyland – Joyce enthusiasts, scholars and novices are warmly invited to come and share their thoughts & questions on the author and his works.
Singer & songwriter Carol Keogh and musician Katherine Atkinson take a fresh interpretation of some of the many songs referenced in Ulysses, and arrange them for voices, violin, electronics, glockenspiel and ukelele.
Dublin-born poet & playwright, Stephen James Smith presents a selection of his own works which are in some way inspired by, or resonant with Joyce and Ulysses.
Born and bred in Dublin, Frank Hyland first discovered Joyce in his late 20s while living abroad in the 1970s. Finding in Ulysses a deeply resonant portrait of a his home town and the characters that populated it, a life-long fascination with both the author and his works ensued. Frank has been attending the Joyce Summer School in Trieste for the past 20 years, and is always on the lookout for new angles on Joyce, and fellow enthusiasts with whom to share reflections on one of Ireland’s most celebrated artists.
Songwriter Carol Keogh has been part of the independent music scene in Ireland since the 90s, both as a solo artist/band leader, and in collaboration with other artists including Sharon Shannon, Jerry Fish & Colm Mac Con Iomaire. She recently released part 1 of her new project, The Wolf Chronicles under the moniker, ‘The Wicc’, described as “a conspicuously individual work by an important Irish artist” (Irish Times)
Katherine Atkinson is a performer, musician and cultural manager. In 2019 she curated Your Self Made Super Human, an experimental performance event in the Wexford Arts Centre. She’s performed with Anu Productions, Dublin Live Art Festival & Project Brand New, and currently performs with the Simon Quigley Ensemble.
Friends for many years through their respective involvement in the Dublin music scene, by coincidence Carol & Katherine are both currently based in Wexford, and have come together on this occasion as artistic collaborators for the first time.
Stephen James Smith is a Dublin poet and playwright central to the rise of the Irish spoken word scene. His poetry videos have amassed over 3 million views online, including ‘My Ireland’, a short poetry film commissioned by St. Patrick’s Festival. Stephen has performed extensively at top venues and events such as Electric Picnic, Other Voices, the National Concert Hall, the Abbey Theatre (Noble Call), Vicar Street (alongside Oscar winner Glen Hansard), the London Palladium, the Oscar Wilde Awards (LA), Glastonbury Festival and George Town Literary Festival (ML). His debut collection, Fear Not, is published by Arlen House with a launch due in June 2018.
Artist & composer, Laura Hyland works across composition, performance, sculpture & poetry. Current projects include Sounding Seams – an ongoing exploration of metal sound sculpture; her band, Clang Sayne (www.clangsayne.com), ‘venturers in the post-genre slip stream, weaving folk, improv, art pop and contemporary classical into new material that is soft on the ear but tough as leather.’ (Irish Times); and a new commission for Ireland’s leading contemporary classical group, Crash Ensemble.