Eímear Noone on conducting at the Oscars and her first Galway show: ‘People assume I’m driven in my career. It was all accidental’

February 2020, and the Galway-born composer and conductor was about to make history as the first woman to conduct the orchestra at the Oscars. Noone, who brings her own show to Galway next Wednesday, adds: “You walk into the Dolby Theatre, and it’s an actual theatre, like any other. It feels like home in that way, you’re used to that environment. Then a few hours later, Quentin Tarantino is sitting in front of me during the show [when she wasn’t on-stage conducting].”

One ofthe most surreal moments, she remembers, came during rehearsals when each chair had a giant picture of who would be sitting there later, so the crew could practise camera shots.

“Then I see my picture! ‘Hold on — you’re not in Kansas anymore, Eímear’. The ultra-normal meets the not-so-normal.”

Backstage, she remembers watching the English actress Cynthia Erivo, with all of Elton John’s backing singers, roaring at the screen.

“I was crying with laughter, trying not to mess up my make-up. The whole experience was joyful — and on a musical level, an absolute dream.”

Noone and her husband, composer and producer Craig Stuart Garfinkle, have arranged music for other Oscars ceremonies, and she would love to conduct more awards bashes: “I just love celebrating the work of other artists.”

Upcoming is Cellissimo, a nine-day cello festival organised by Music for Galway. The centrepiece is her concert with the National Symphony Orchestra.

“I’m about to conduct my first concert in my home city of Galway,” she says, “which is so special. I’m very excited, and grateful to the NSO for performing with me. It’s a homecoming for me, and a celebration of my musical journey: from classical roots in Galway, to the present day of film and game scores.

“Having grown up in rural Galway, I didn’t get to hear an orchestra until I played in one, so this is really important to me; I know what it means for a kid to hear an orchestra for the first time.”

There is, she adds, “so much cross-pollination” in the evening’s programme: a lot of music written by herself, Craig and their friends, brought to us by familiar players — lead cellist Adrian Mantu, of the brilliant ConTempo Quartet, has worked on several of her film and video game soundtracks.

“A lot of the NSO musicians would do those recordings too, and Finghin Collins [artistic director of Music for Galway since 2013] played piano on our score for The Canterville Ghost,” the 2023 animated movie voiced by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. “It’s such fun to share these scores with a live audience.”

Noone prepares for concerts by listening to AC/DC’s classic rocker Back in Black; next week she brings a full orchestral version on-stage.

“I can already hear it in my head!” she laughs. “I’ve done a pared-down version with Adrian; he can play like a total rockstar. My musical tastes are eclectic, anyway: I love Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Stravinsky, Bach, Mozart, trad, jazz… And this an eclectic programme; I like to share different flavours of music with people. I feel, in some ways, that I always programme for my family — a typical Galway family — so hopefully I’ll get it right.”

Noone is speaking from her home beside a lake in Los Angeles. She’s lived in California for almost two decades, but since Covid divides the year between the City of Angels and Co Galway. “We kind of wilfully got trapped at home [in Ireland] during lockdown, which reminded us how much family life we were missing out on,” she says. The small stuff: cups of tea, neighbours coming to the back-kitchen door… the things that make Irish life so rich.

“So we moved in next-door to my mother in Kilconnell! There’s a big difference between east Galway and LA, and I absolutely love both. So do my kids. We come to LA after Christmas, when the weather is rotten at home — which also coincides with awards season and Ireland Week [festival] over here. But there’s nowhere I’d rather be in summertime than Galway.”

Now 46, she has scored over two dozen films, TV shows and games, including the iconic World of Warcraft and Legend of Zelda. She’s also expanded genre limits, regularly touring orchestral arrangements of game music (Electric Arcade and Videogames in Concert). She has conducted several major orchestras around the world, and is the subject of a forthcoming feature-length documentary, Conductrix.

She grew up in Kilconnell. All her siblings play — brother Eamonn is a DJ and dance music producer — and for her, it all began with the simple tin whistle.

“You can’t grow up in east Galway and not play trad! My grandfather was a great musician, and [legendary fiddler and composer] Paddy Fahey lived across the road from the national school. My first experience of music was being handed a tin whistle in junior infants.

“And that was it. I was so excited by this thing that responded to what I did. My teacher noticed I could play by ear when I went away for the weekend and learned a few tunes off the telly, and insisted to my parents that I study music formally.”

She went on to learn classical piano and flute. As a teenager, she would catch a train every Saturday at 6am to the Royal Irish Academy of Music. “My childhood gave me an appreciation of lots of different genres,” she says. “If you did music, you were expected to play everything. We were all in the local musical society, doing Broadway. We all played trad. We all played at Mass. I really appreciated that. My world now is orchestral crossover, and I found that kind of place at a young age, I think.”

She did workshops on composition with the Irish Chamber Choir and the Irish Music Rights Organisation, then studied Music at Trinity College Dublin, including modules on film scoring. While still in college, Noone sang in a choir assembled by classmate David Downes (creator of Celtic Woman) for the Japanese composer for the Metal Gear Solid video game.

“I wasn’t even aware that’s what we were doing, and I didn’t realise until my brother told me that it was such a big deal,” she says. “Then I got hired by a score orchestrator in Los Angeles, and my first job was World of Warcraft. It was the right skill-set and timing. We were always a Nintendo house, there’s a great gaming community in Ireland, and I was like, ‘What? I get to work on a game score, with an orchestra. How are these worlds I love, coming together like this?’

“It was all accidental. Everything was instinct. People assume I’m driven in my career, but I never thought about it — it’s more the sounds and how I can make them and be around people who do. I wanted to come to LA anyway to be near orchestrators and conductors and composers I loved, like Thomas Newman and John Williams and Randy Newman.

“Eventually, I got to conduct their music at the Academy Awards. People asked me afterwards, ‘Did you meet all these amazing actors?’ I got to perform for those composers, which was the best thing about it.”

• Eímear Noone with the National Symphony Orchestra play Leisureland Galway on May 22 at 8pm. Cellissimo runs from May 18-26. See musicforgalway.ie/cellissimo-2024