Eamonn trained at the Royal Academy of Music and has worked as a musician in theatres all over the world. As a composer he has written original music for Stones in his Pockets (Dukes Theatre Lancaster); Five Children & It (Tristan Bates); Portia Coughlan (Old Red Lion); Around the World in Eighty Days & The Glass Menagerie (Chipping Norton Theatre); Much Ado About Nothing (Stockholm English Speaking Theatre); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Barakura Festival Theatre, Japan); The Massacre (Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds); Liquorice & Smokerings (New Wolsey, Ipswich); and Frankenstein (Dorset Corset Theatre Company). He is a frequent musical collaborator at Sir Peter Hall’s Rose Theatre in Kingston, where he has written scores for The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, Our Town, A Christmas Carol, Hamlet, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Arabian Nights & Alice in Wonderland. His original musical The 
House of Mirrors & Hearts won the Musical Theatre Matters Award for Best New Musical Score at the Edinburgh Festival in 2010, and after a critically acclaimed run at London’s Arcola Theatre, will receive its US premiere in July 2016.
Eamonn is currently working on Fanny & Stella, a new musical adaptation of Neil McKenna’s award-nominated book of the same name.
This past year I got to know Eamonn while working on NEXT Concert Series: Bridge the Gap, and I couldn’t be happier to introduce him to you all!
MM: First things first, when did you know you wanted to be a composer/songwriter?
EO: It dawned on my quite gradually! I worked as an actor for 12 years, but during a long theatre contract in 2009 I started working on a musical (The House of Mirrors & Hearts). It began as a passion project, but then other people started to offer me commissions, often with acting thrown in. It began as something fun, then a handy extra skill for theatre work, and now has taken over entirely!
MM: Do you remember the first song you wrote?
EO: It was called Funny and it was about a break-up. I think every songwriter’s first song is about a break-up…!
MM: What books are permanently on your bookshelf?
EO: Finishing the Hat, Roget’s Thesaurus and the Penguin Rhyming Dictionary. Oh, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I won’t lend that to anyone.
MM: If you were stranded on a desert island, (assuming there was a TV and internet access), what television shows and movies would you want available to you?
EO: I’d be bored and lonely, so I’d need to laugh… The Simpsons. And there are enough of them to keep me chuckling til I get rescued.
MM: What words of wisdom would you give to aspiring composers and songwriters?
EO: Just sit down and do it. If you have an idea for a lyric, write it down. If you hear a melody in your head, record it – I think I’ve forgotten more good ideas than I’ve come up with over time, so I’m learning to grab them while they’re forming!
MM: Who are your musical theatre inspirations?
EO: A few years ago I would have said Sondheim, but I’ve begun to realise that he doesn’t inspire me, he makes me want to stop because I listen to his work and I wonder why I should bother! I guess I’m inspired by great voices, of performers that is. No one famous or starry.. I hear some exceptionally talented people in the industry and I think ‘I wonder what that voice could do? What story could that voice tell…?’
MM: In the United States, arts education programs are often in danger of being cut, due to budgetary restraints. What reasons would you give to a school official and/or political for preserving arts education programming in schools?
EO: Oh my God, where do you even start?! Training in the arts is everything. No one is suggesting every child becomes a singer or an actor, but music and drama teach you so many invaluable social skills: integration, expression, listening, sensitivity. In a world where a child’s whole life can be reduced to the contents of a smart phone, we need to nurture kids to communicate with each other through different means, and I don’t think there’s a better way than through the arts. It makes me so sad that we even have to fight for it.
MM: Who is/was your greatest teacher?
EO: My parents. Without a shadow of a doubt.
Thank you, Eamonn!
Live, Love, Learn,