TY Internship Programme - Aobh Geraghty

Aobh Geraghty has been studying piano with us for nearly a decade. Last month, she became our first TY Intern of the year. During her first placement in November, Aobh met Cabinet Minister Darragh O'Brien TD, she shadowed several of our teachers (both in-person and online lessons), she composed a piece of music, she filmed during a video shoot, she created the IIMS TikTok account, and she wrote this blog!

Aobh (right) with fellow intern Clare (left)

Hi! My name is Aobh. I take piano lessons with Michael at the IIMS. I have done my work experience for the last week here at the campus in Balbriggan.

The Interview

At first I was not sure what to expect because it is my first time doing a TY Internship. After helping at the Sounds Good summer camp in August, I was sure I would enjoy my experience. Then after my interview with Donál and Sarah, who both work and teach at IIMS, I was shown a list of all the activities I would be doing throughout the week. I particularly enjoyed the creative part of this internship the most because it made the work experience more interesting for me.

Goals I had for the week:

● Composition Creating a jingle

● Social Media Marketing - Set up the IIMS Tiktok account with Hugh

● Education Get some experience with teaching / shadowing lessons

● Video Production - Learn how to edit videos

Composing my jingle

Firstly I started by looking up jingles on YouTube for example the Mc Donald’s jingle and many others. Musical features I noticed were that they all end in a perfect cadence. And there were sticatos at the end. The jingle also had to be simple and catchy, something that would stay in your head. Next I started composing the jingle. I decided to keep it major and light hearted. I started with a chord progression to work off of. In the end I choose I, IV, V, I. This made sense to me because there no minor chords in the jingle. I then started making a melody that fit in with the chords. At first I just played around with the notes to see what sounded best and then I wrote it down on manuscript paper. Once i had my main melody done I made it into a quartet. For four voices: bass, tenor, alto and soprano. After doing this I brainstormed ideas for words for the jingle. This part I found especially hard because my theme was Christmas but it’s difficult to come up with a short sentence or phrase without sounding too cheesy.

As I had never done something like this before, I ran into a few problems along the way hat Dónal helped me with. Dónal is Director of the IIMS so it was interesting to work directly with him. Firstly my original key was C major. This turned out to be too low and Dónal advised me to move up a few keys so in the end I chose E major. Secondly, my piano teacher, Michael - who is also a director of IIMS - suggested that I make the two bars like a sequence.

TikTok

It was great setting up the TikTok account with IIMS Producer Hugh. He teaches here, edits videos, records audio and is a YouTuber and streams on Twitch. Our first Tiktok was an easy tutorial on "Someone Like You" by Adele. From this post, we got 64 likes and over 300 views which I didn’t expect for the first video. Learning and talking about social media is also very interesting to me because it is a part of my everyday life.

I also enjoyed finishing putting the jingle together. Creating the jingle is something I have never done before but it was a fun experience. I think the most challenging thing this week was finishing the jingle and perfecting it. I enjoyed the process but it was a challenge because I have never had to do anything like it before. I also think a big learning curve for me will be shadowing lessons because I have very little experience in teaching.

Other things I did this week included going through instruments to catalogue them in each room for the inventory. I also started organising sheet music for the IIMS library, organising the sheet music by instrument.

To apply for the TY Internship Programme at the Irish Institute of Music and Song, please send your CV and letter of interest to sarah@fingalacademyofmusic.com.