Galway Early Music promotes the performance of medieval, renaissance and baroque music in Galway City and County.

Galway Early Music’s main event is

The Galway Early Music Festival

which runs annually in May and features concerts by top international performers, workshops, schools events and music and theatre in the Galway City Museum and in the street. The Festival has a unique, relaxed and friendly atmosphere and highlights the medieval town of Galway and the artistic and cultural richness of the area.

Galway Early Music  promotes occasional concerts, talks and workshops throughout the year as well.  GEM also has its own ensemble, Seoda (= gems in Irish), which is open to any musicians who would like to explore early music performance.  Seoda performs throughout the year at functions and local events.

The 2009 Festival:

 Islands were both culturally isolated and cultural meeting points. Water divided them from the mainland, but the waters around them were also the highways of our period. While we find indigenous musical cultures on the islands of Europe, there is also much evidence of musical contact between islands and the mainland. So the Canaries, a dance music from the Canary Islands, becomes a European fashion, Irish harpists turn up as court musicians in England and Ireland and, as always, music built bridges. A fitting theme for Galway City, a city made up of a number of islands joined to the mainland by bridges, guarded at the mouth of the bay by the Aran islands, and the westernmost city on the island of Ireland.

 Galway Early Music is granted aided by: