“Aonaracht” Feature: The Irish Times

Úna Monaghan in studio, photo credit Damian McCann

Úna Monaghan is a harp player and a composer, a sound engineer and an academic whose latest solo album, Aonaracht, is a heady exploration of “the private relationship between a musician and their instrument”. A collection of six pieces for solo traditional musician and computer, her album explores some complex questions. And Monaghan’s facility with tune titles prods the listener to delve deep beneath. Between the Piper and the Pipes and Who Do You Play For? are just two of those titles that draw the listener deep beneath the surface of the tunes, to reveal a glimpse of what that relationship might be – a 21st-century meditation on Yeats’s question, how can we know the dancer from the dance?

Aonaracht is the start of a whole new series of conversations about traditional music.

Siobhán Long, The Irish Times, 2 February 2023