Eimear Noone: From east Galway to the Oscars and the struggles she faced along the way

The track ‘Thunderstruck’ was playing in her headphones as she walked down the corridor, past the jury and into the courtroom at Stanley Mosk courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

As the lyrics say, “there was no turning back”, and she needed a force to urge her onwards.

“Would Malcolm [Young, rhythm guitar with AC/DC] and Angus [Young, lead guitar] get nervous? No, they wouldn’t,” she says now, recalling how the song, with its great guitar solo at the beginning, helped her to fight — and win — a precedent-setting case that changed the law in the state of California.

Thanks to Eímear Noone, the law now protects pregnant women of the stage on any project that originates in the state of California, even if it’s a touring project.

“It was absolutely the hardest thing I’ve ever done that didn’t involve the death of a family member,” she says, but she wasn’t going to allow herself to be bullied.

And she wasn’t going to allow the same thing to happen to another woman because, without challenge, it was guaranteed to happen again.

“We will be the ones to set the precedent for how women are treated in the job and how women are paid in the job.”

When the jury sided with her, she finally felt part of Los Angeles — some 11 years after moving there.

“The fake, plastic LA gets lots of press, but people forget that the vast majority of people working in that city work really, really hard to make ends meet and are decent,” she says, still clearly moved that a diverse group of people stood up for an Irish immigrant, and a woman at that.

Eímear Noone’s history-making achievements rightly make the headlines. There was much well-deserved fanfare when she became the first female conductor to perform at the 92nd Academy Awards ceremony in 2020, for instance. There are many other firsts too (she was the first woman to conduct at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, to name one), as well as a slew of awards for composing music for film and video games.

Her music on the video game, World of Warcraft, has reached a staggering 100m people worldwide and she lists a dizzying array of upcoming projects that involve composing music for games and films.

She also conducts orchestras worldwide. Here is a short but far-from-complete list of those orchestras: the Royal Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Singapore Symphony, Pittsburg Symphony, and Sydney Symphony.

A recent performance with the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Concertgebouw concert hall in Amsterdam was a dream come true.

But behind the shimmering accomplishments, there is a woman from east Galway who is gloriously forthright about the hard struggle along the way.

She celebrates the highs, but she also talks about the lows because it’s important to talk about the reality of working in a field where just one or two per cent of the world’s conductors are women. In fact, the numbers are so low that there are no real statistics yet.

The challenges, however, don’t always come from working in a male-dominated sphere. She recalls a very difficult moment when, just eight weeks after having her second son and not having slept for 48 hours, she found herself working with a female orchestra manager who was very unhelpful.

“I’ll never forget it. The concert went fine, but the experience was so negative. Luckily, I was working with the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra after that, and we had such a great experience together that sort of filled my heart back up. It picked me up off the floor.”

She mentions the experience because she took all the negativity on herself and pushed through. “Looking at the younger ones, women my stepdaughter’s age [24], I would be so mad at them for pushing that hard. But I felt at the time, if I don’t honour that contract, these people will never hire a young woman again thinking they could get pregnant, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that.”

Forging a better world for the women that come after her is a theme that runs through Eímear Noone’s conversation. She took inspiration from the generation of women just before her, ceiling-breaking female conductors Marin Alsop and Simone Young, but as a child she had never seen a woman conduct.

“They talk about, if you can see it, you can be it. However, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean you can’t be it. As a child, I just thought, I’m going to be a conductor. I simply did not know how difficult it would be or could be,” she said.

She had help along the way from people she calls ‘angels’: “We all need our angels, and they pop up all over the place and in different forms. You know, nobody ever gets anywhere by themselves.”

One of her earliest angels came in the form of schoolteacher Sister Vianney who allowed her, on occasion, to conduct the school orchestra. The eye-rolls of her classmates were unforgettable, she says, but that didn’t stop her, as a teenager, volunteering to play with, and later conduct, the Army Band of the Western Command when it visited her school.

“It’s the chutzpah of a 15-year-old,” she laughs. Much later, she was telling that story to a colleague of hers, Liam Daly. “He asked me what year that was and when I told him, he said, ‘Oh, my God, that conductor was me’.”

Another angel in disguise.

After graduating from Trinity College Dublin, she and friend Jillian Saunders set up the Dublin City Concert Orchestra. They filled the National Concert Hall in Dublin simply because nobody told them that it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done.

Their passion and excitement for music, rather than ambition, spurred them on. That sense of excitement still ripples through Eímear’s voice when she talks about the moment-by-moment joy of music and how it transcends race, religion, and gender.

“It’s always about, what do you have to contribute? For me, [conducting] is a little bit like time travel. I’m in the moment with the orchestra and I’m also thinking of what’s coming up ahead. So, you’re in the past, the present, and the future at the same time. You sort of become like a character actor. You’re having the music going through you and you’re trying to embody the characters in the music as it changes character as well. You’re not the same person when you’re conducting Mozart’s Requiem as you are when you’re conducting the theme from Super Mario Brothers. It’s wonderful because the deeper you let your imagination get into the music, the better.”

Speaking of time travel, she casually remarks that her ability to read a score and anticipate what lay ahead helped her to learn to drive in a single day in Los Angeles. She pleads the fifth when asked why she had to do that, just as she’s not willing to say too much about doing her upcoming Irish driving test.

It is safe to assume that the latter is necessary because she had been spending much more time in Ireland since the pandemic. She and her husband, Craig Garfinkle, and their two sons, aged 10 and 7, divide their time between “the west (California) and the wesht (Galway)”, as Eimear puts it. Her step-daughter lives in London.

Talk of driving tests brings the conversation around to failure. The award-winning composer speaks regularly about how she had to learn to fail — in public and in front of an audience — because the only way you can learn to conduct is by doing it.

“Conducting is a lifelong pursuit. I’m learning something new every single day, and you’re improving in front of the public; you’re improving in front of the orchestra,” she says.

Musicians and artists are taught to be analytical and self-critical, which is important, but it’s equally important to know when to switch off the nagging critic, she says.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a musician come off stage and go, ‘Well, that was perfect’ because perfect isn’t real. It’s important to be able to take things on the chin, when something doesn’t go the way you wanted it to go.”

When there is an inevitable bump along the way, Eímear Noone draws inspiration from her musical heroes — which range from Beethoven to the aforementioned AC/DC — and her ‘sheroes’: “Mary McAleese is a shero of mine. She’s incredible. Mary Robinson too. I’m being obvious there but, this might surprise you, I love Lady Gaga too. This is somebody who keeps pushing her own limits, keeps pushing herself to greater heights, but also to greater challenges.”

When Eímear needs some vicarious courage, she watches Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl half time show. Watching other women taking on a challenge helps her enormously. The last time she performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London, for instance, her brother made her watch boxer Katie Taylor walk on in Las Vegas.

“I just think she’s unbelievable. Her clarity of mind, her mindset. At least when I go out there, nobody’s going to try to physically harm me.”

Every time Eímear performs at the Royal Albert Hall, she dedicates the concert to the first woman to conduct there — Meath-born Alicia Adelaide Needham. “I’ve never been so glad to not be the first woman to do something ever.”

She is campaigning to have a bust of Alicia included in the plans for the redevelopment of the National Concert Hall. She would also like to see copies of her scores made available so that young Irish composers and conductors can access them more easily. If, as a child, Eímear had known of Alicia Needham (1863-1945) — considered “the greatest Irish woman composer” of her day — she wouldn’t have felt she was wading through the jungle with a machete, cutting a new path. “I should have been able to say, well, Alicia Adelaide Needham did it, and she couldn’t even vote at the time.”

At least now, a new path is being forged for the next generation. As a musician, Eímear says her job is to create a little space for your imagination for a couple of hours’ distraction, yet she believes it is also really important to speak about the women who have taken the hard road — people such as local historian Catherine Corless in Tuam and American women’s rights lawyer Gloria Allred — to bring about real change.

“That drives me to speak openly on things and create vocabulary and dialogue around certain things that involve, in particular, women’s day-to-day lives and our mental health and emotional health,” she says.

She’s very optimistic, though, when she sees Gen-Z Irish women who are confident and courageous, and well-educated. She has just one message for them: “The sky’s the limit.”