Antient Concert Rooms

The Antient Concert Rooms are a Dublin performance venue where music, cultural ambition, and the practical business of staging concerts meet. In the Éire Abu Society’s four-night series, the venue exposes the gap between an ambitious programme and weak public attendance; in the Morkan family’s history, it also hosts Mary Jane’s annual pupils’ concert.

The Society’s Concert Series

The Antient Concert Rooms were selected for four grand concerts scheduled from Wednesday through Saturday. Kathleen Kearney was engaged as accompanist for the series, with a contract promising her eight guineas. Her mother, Mrs Kearney, helped shape the programme and its printed bills, bringing practical knowledge of how performers should be presented and how the running order might keep an audience entertained.

The opening night revealed trouble before the music began. When Mrs Kearney and Kathleen arrived on Wednesday, a few young stewards wearing bright blue badges stood idle in the vestibule. Through the open hall door, Mrs Kearney saw the reason: the audience was sparse. The hour was not mistaken; it was still twenty minutes to eight. In the dressing-room, the performers waited nervously, glancing at the mirror and handling their music while reports came from the box office. Nearly half past eight, the small audience began asking to be entertained, and the secretary, Mr Fitzpatrick, proposed that they open the ball.

The Final Concert and Payment Dispute

Publicity followed the poor opening: handbills were distributed through Dublin on Friday morning, and the evening papers carried notices urging music-lovers to attend the next night. Mrs Kearney remained uneasy, told her husband some of her suspicions, and accepted his offer to accompany her on Saturday.

On the rainy final-concert night, the family arrived at the rooms forty-five minutes before the scheduled start. Mrs Kearney left Kathleen’s clothes and music with her husband and searched the building for Mr Holohan or Mr Fitzpatrick, but found neither. After considerable difficulty, a steward brought her to Miss Beirne, who expected the secretaries shortly and asked whether she could help. Mrs Kearney declined. The delayed access to the Society’s officers and the earlier signs of poor organization form the setting for the dispute over the concert agreement and Kathleen’s promised fee.

The Morkan Family’s Pupils’ Concert

The venue also figures in the Morkan sisters’ musical and working life. Mary Jane, who had trained at the Academy and supported the household through her organ work in Haddington Road, gave a pupils’ concert every year in the upper room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils came from better-class families along the Kingstown and Dalkey line, connecting the performance space to the social world in which her teaching operated.

That annual concert stands alongside the Morkans’ long-established dance on Usher’s Island: two recurring forms of musical sociability, one held in the family home and the other in a rented concert room. The venue thus links the Kearneys’ public, culturally nationalist concert enterprise with Mary Jane’s professional teaching, while its episodes show how performance depends not only on artistic preparation but also on attendance, organization, and agreed payment.