NIAMH GALLAGER -
MMus Performance and Related Studies

Niamh Gallagher is a disabled violist, whose practice centres around solo viola repertoire. Her work primarily focuses on the work of 21st century composers of all backgrounds who work with extended viola techniques.  

This passion for non-standard technique stems from being a performer who also has a disability. Niamh aims to explore the intersections of disability and performance through interdisciplinary projects, such as amending canonical techniques and making musical adjustments to inform her own disability informed practice and how these can be added to the larger musical discourse. Her current work Surfacing explores the lack of research conducted by individuals who were born with disabilities and how a performer can adapt their practice through many different avenues. Niamh’s practice based, ‘discovery-led’ (Bell and Stonemason, 2016) approach surfaces the constant negotiations, between her wider ‘body-mind continuum’ (Oliveros in Lely and Saunders, 2012: 290), her disabled identity, the viola and the performing environment.

Her research project was entitled: Surfacing: Disability Studies, Performativity and Musical Performance. A practice-led, interdisciplinary project carried out by Niamh, who is a disabled practitioner, through the lens of her viola practice. In her research Niamh wanted to highlight the lumpy, human experience of being a musician who is also disabled and how these two facets of her identity merge and sometimes clash. Everything in her practice is a negotiation, between her mind and body, her disability and her body, her body and the viola, her body and the performing environment. These negotiations can be smooth, yet sometimes they can be very challenging.  Surfacing illuminates the individual adaptions Niamh has made to her practice, as well as showing that all of this goes on underneath the performative exterior.

Instagram: niamh.gallagher