RONAN BROWNE
Born and bred in Dublin, Ronan Browne left the city in 1990, spending ten years in the Glen of Imaal in Wicklow before crossing the Shannon in the year 2000, to live in Spiddal.

Musicians Peter O’Loughlin, Willie Clancy, Séamus Ennis, Leo Rowsome, Tommy Reck, Denis Murphy and Tommy Potts were family friends so it is no wonder that they all had a huge affect on Ronan’s musical development. It was only in later years that his maternal grandmother Delia Murphy’s singing became important to him, the young Ronan seeing her more as grandmother than influential singer in his early years.

Ronan’s first lessons were in the newly formed Na Píobairí Uilleann from Dan O’Dowd in the early 1970s and as he grew older, John Kelly’s Capel Street shop “The Horse Shoe” and the “Four Seasons” pub next door, became his place of learning – if you waited long enough it seemed that all the good musicians passed through at some time. Kevin Glackin has been a lifelong friend and they have played together since their youth. The friendship with Seán Tyrrell built up in the 1980s over many late nights in Ollie Conway’s pub in Mullach in County Clare.

Having spent his whole life as a professional musician, Ronan straddles that difficult divide between pure traditional music and the modern electronic world, his work ranging from solo projects, playing with Glackin and Tyrrell, his celebrated duet with veteran musician Peter O’Loughlin, his trio CRAN, his acclaimed collaboration with poet Louis de Paor and trio performances with sean nós singer Róisín Elsafty and harpist Siobhan Armstrong, on to writing and performing music for film & television and as the original piper with both the Afro Celt Sound System and Riverdance.

Ronan has been involved in over 100 album recordings since his first venture into the studio in 1982 and has collaborated with many of the top artists playing traditional Irish music, classical, pop, jazz and country.

Among Ronan’s recent ventures have included a highly critically acclaimed listening/music appreciation class which opens peoples ears to the depths of Irish music and a series of in-depth historical and critical articles on the piper and pipe-maker R. L. O’Mealy (1873-1947) for the Seán Reid Society. Ronan has been a member of the house band for three series of the hugely successful cult music programme “The Transatlantic Sessions”. His music has been used in many films including “The Secret of Roan Inis”, “Circle of Friends”, “Rob Roy” and “Gangs of New York” while possibly the strangest place his music has been placed was in the Playboy video of Farrah Fawcett, “All of Me”!

Since 2007, Ronan has been playing pipes, flutes and whistles for wedding ceremonies and was awarded “Wedding Musician of the Year, 2011” at the “Weddings Online” awards. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.