Dr Siobhan Armstrong

Siobhán Armstrong is a performer, academic, artistic director, passionate educator and mentor exploring historical repertory on reconstructions of medieval to baroque harps including the multi-row arpa doppia and arpa de dos órdenes, and the Gaelic cláirseach. Siobhán has performed Renaissance and baroque, sacred and chamber music, and opera, with leading international period-instrument soloists, ensembles and conductors in the field, including Les Arts Florissants, The Academy of Ancient Music, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, and Florilegium, recording with Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, Virgin Classics, Linn, Dorian and Delphian, among others. The debut CD of Siobhán’s own ensemble, The Irish Consort, entitled Music, Ireland and the Sixteenth Century was an Irish Times’ top-five international Classical Music pick of 2021. Siobhán’s work also includes Hollywood film soundtrack solos, collaborations with Gaelic-music colleagues at traditional music festivals including Lorient, France; Panceltic, Ireland; Celtic Connections, Scotland, and contemporary art-music performance projects involving historical harps.
Siobhán was born in Dublin, and graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a B.A. Mod. in Music in 1987. She directed the university chamber choir, was a professional choral singer in the national broadcaster’s RTE Chamber Choir, and won national and international prizes for modern-Irish-harp performance. On graduation, Siobhán was invited to establish a harp class at the Schule für Musik, Theater und Tanz in Stuttgart-Sindelfingen, Germany. She took historical harp tuition with Andrew Lawrence King at the Akademie für Alte Musik in Bremen in the early 1990s. Siobhán moved back to Ireland in 1998, and now divides her time between Kilkenny city and London.
Siobhán is the founding director (2003) of The Historical Harp Society of Ireland, the resource organisation spearheading the international revival of the ancient harp of Ireland and Scotland, strung in brass wires. In 2015, she located a lost historic Irish harp, followed by her 2016 commission of the first 3D-laser scan of a musical instrument at The National Museum of Ireland. Siobhán was awarded a PhD (Middlesex University, 2022) for her research into historical performance-practice evidence surviving in field transcriptions of harp repertory notated in the 1790s. In 2021, Siobhán was invited to be an Occasional Lecturer at University College Dublin, and in 2024 she was appointed Historical Harp professor at The Royal College of Music in London. Siobhán would like to acknowledge Music Network and The Arts Council of Ireland for their kind support for her work.
Faculties / departments: Historical Performance
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