Guiding Bells – Professor Mel Mercier and the Irish Gamelan Orchestra

6 Oct 2023

Happening On 06/10/2023

This October, Professor Mel Mercier will lead the Irish Gamelan Orchestra (IGO) and special guests in GUIDING BELLS, a musical celebration of his contribution to artistic life and education in Cork and Ireland.

On the evening, Mel and the IGO will be joined by a host of special guests, including singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, dancer Colin Dunne, cellist Kate Ellis, fiddle player Tara Breen, West Cork Ukulele Orchestra, saxophonist Nick Roth, soprano Claire Egan, singers Kathleen Turner and Óscar Mascareñas. 

UCC Music’s Kelly Boyle and Kevin McNally are Assistant Musical Directors of the IGO, and its members are all UCC Music graduates.

Ahead of the concert at The Everyman, Cork on 6^th October, we caught up with Mel who shared some memories about his time at UCC and what the concert means to him.

What does this evening in Cork celebrating your achievements and contributions to music mean to you? 

Cork is where my music vibrates with the greatest force, where is makes most sense. Moving from Dublin to Cork in 1986 – back to the birthplace of my father – to study music as a ‘mature’ student at UCC was a defining journey for me. At that time, UCC had recently begun to welcome traditional musicians onto its undergraduate music programmes, and I was fortunate to be offered a place as a bodhrán and bones player on the BMus course. Over the next three years my mentor Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin and his colleagues, including Paul Everett, Geoff Spratt and many others, were my guides on a journey into music.  Those formative years of study laid the foundations of my musical life, and over the following quarter of a century UCC and Cork became my musical and spiritual home.

I’ve played many concerts in Cork, all the way back to the late 80s and early 90s when I performed often at the old Triskel with Mícheál, sometimes two shows on the one night. And, later, with the Cork Gamelan Ensemble (now the Irish Gamelan Orchestra) the Aula Maxima, UCC and the Ó Riada Hall in the Department of Music were the venues for many special and memorable lunchtime and evening concerts. I haven’t played in Cork for some time, which makes the return home to City, to the Everyman all the more exciting.

I can’t wait to lead the Irish Gamelan Orchestra with Kelly Boyle and Kevin McNally in a performance of our many collaborations with a host of wonderful guests in a house full of former students and colleagues, friends and family!

You must have so many good memories of your time teaching at UCC. Can you share one or two with us? 

After I graduated from UCC in 1989 I went to Los Angeles to study for a performance-based Master of Fine Arts in World Music Percussion at the California Institute of the Arts. I returned to Ireland in 1992 and began teaching ‘world music’ as a part-time lecturer at UCC. What became clear immediately was that the students had a great enthusiasm  for learning about the North and South Indian, West African and Indonesian music I was teaching, especially if it included actually playing the music! That enthusiasm was hugely affirming and infectious! With the arrival of a full Javanese gamelan and many  other instruments from Ghana and India in the mid-90s, the demand for  classes in non-Western music grew and by the end of the century UCC had emerged as the leading centre for the study of world music performance in Ireland. 

What is next for the Irish Gamelan Orchestra?

The next few years will be busy for the Irish Gamelan Orchestra. We are planning to release an album of the music we created for the Gare St Lazare production of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is Part 2, which we performed at The Everyman (2019) and the Coronet Theatre, London (2022), and filmed for Dublin Theatre Festival (2021).   We also have our sights set on a return visit to Java in 2024 to perform at the Yogya Gamelan Festival. In 2018 we represented Ireland at the first International Gamelan Festival in Surakarta, Java, where we also visited the forge where the UCC gamelan was made. Our debut album of original music for gamelan, The Three Forges, was released in 2015 and we are now looking forward to going back into the studio to record the new material we have created over the last ten years. I think we might call that album GUIDING BELLS.

Tickets for Guiding Bells are on sale now at

https://everymancork.com/events/guiding-bells-mel-mercier-irish-gamelan-orchestra-and-special-guests/