Music bursary will enable winner pull strings in Brazil

A pioneering student of the eight-string Brahms guitar, who this week won the first RDS Music Bursary, plans to use the €10,000 prize to travel to Brazil to study with the instrument's inventor.

Mr Redmond O'Toole (26), from Bray, Co Wicklow, was chosen for the bursary from 13 people who each had won senior competitions at the 2003 Feis Ceoil.

A final-year music student at DIT, who worked for three years as a bicycle courier to put himself through college, O'Toole took up the Brahms guitar - also known as the cello guitar - after meeting its original master, Paul Galbraith, at a music festival in Scotland in 2000.

O'Toole's uncle, a guitar- maker, designed and constructed his first eight-string instrument and DIT classical guitarist John Feely taught him to use it, drawing upon cello-playing techniques.

"The first year nearly killed me," he said. "You have to forget what you know and start again."

Practising "on a good day anything up to eight hours", he persevered and last summer - in Scotland again - met his inspiration, Galbraith, who "helped me so much in a short period of time".

Of the bursary, he said it would enable him to travel to Galbraith's home in Brazil for further study and possibly to buy one of the master's guitars. More importantly, he said, "it's such a vote of confidence. When you are practising in your room all the time it is hard to know how you are doing. Something like this can keep me going for, I don't know how long, maybe forever."

O'Toole plays a number of Irish concerts before travelling to a guitar festival in Copenhagen this summer.

Venues include the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin, on June 8th; St Patrick's College, Carlow, on June 14th; and Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, on June 19th.