A full audience takes in the performance of “A Mother’s Voice” in Christ Reformed Church. Courtesy photo

SHEPHERDSTOWN — Musici Ireland made its United States premiere with its original string quartet and multimedia piece, “A Mother’s Voice,” over the weekend.

The group’s three sold-out performances of “A Mother’s Voice” were held on Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday at Christ Reformed Church in Shepherdstown, in partnership with the Contemporary American Theater Festival and the Appalachian Chamber Music Festival (ACMF).

“We’ve traveled all the way over from Ireland to be here,” said Musici Ireland Creative Director Beth McNinch of the all-female group, which currently is the artist in residence at the Belltable/Lime Tree Theatre in Limerick, Ireland.

“I founded Musici back in 2012. It started off as a chamber music collective. We’ve done over a decade of touring around Ireland and performing live radio broadcasts across the European Union,” McNinch said. “Since COVID times, we started moving into developing our own original works. This is our first original, multidisciplinary work.”

Musici Ireland chose to hold its United States premiere in Shepherdstown, due to the connection that one of its members has to the area. Katie Tertell, of Harpers Ferry, is a cellist in Musici Ireland and ACMF’s artistic director. For the past few years, ACMF has worked with CATF to produce a concert during the theater festival’s annual season in Shepherdstown, with “A Mother’s Voice” being selected for this year’s concert.

Violinists Ioana Petcu-Colan and Jane Hackett, left, perform the music to “A Mother’s Voice” with Katie Tertell on the cello, center right, and Beth McNinch on the viola, far right, in Christ Reformed Church. Courtesy photo

“It’s been really, really nice to bring some of our work from across the pond over here,” Tertell said, mentioning she previously lived in Ireland and now lives in England six months out of the year. “It was really important for me, that if I was going to bring something from Ireland, that it would be something that would be really representative of what’s important in the culture in Ireland today.”

“A Mother’s Voice” brought to light a part of Ireland’s recent history that had been largely hidden — its mother and baby homes. Around 60,000 unwed, pregnant women were taken to these homes that were funded by Ireland’s government and largely run by orders of the Roman Catholic Church. The women were expected to give birth and then give up their children, regardless of their personal desires. Some of their children were illegally adopted out, within the country and around the world, while others — thousands of others — died before ever leaving the homes.

“The mother and baby homes were run from the 1920s until the last one shut in 1998, so it’s very recent. It’s an ongoing thing, politically, in Ireland. It’s in the news pretty much all of the time,” McNinch said. “I started thinking about making this production back during the pandemic lockdowns, when there was a lot in the press in Ireland about how the government was trying to interview survivors and find out what actually happened and start a redress scheme.”

McNinch interviewed a number of women about their traumatic experiences in the mother and baby homes, and then incorporated recordings of what they said into visual and auditory aspects of the performance piece.

“It was very difficult to approach these women and gain their trust,” McNinch said. “One thing that helped my case, was that my mom was adopted. She was a forced adoption in the United Kingdom, so it was a similar situation to what they experienced. That brought a different angle to this, for me.

Audience members find their seats in Christ Reformed Church on Sunday night. Tabitha Johnston

“It’s worth remembering that a lot of these women didn’t want to give up their babies. The trauma they experienced was not just from being shunned and taken away from their families,” McNinch said. “They didn’t have a choice in it.”

Tertell noted that this story was, in spite of its Irish roots, particularly relevant to share with international audiences.

“The number of people that we’ve had come over to us after our performances, who have some connection to the mother and baby homes, has been overwhelming,” Tertell said. “One of the reasons I felt it was important to bring this to the U.S., was because a lot of the children who had been put up for adoption had ended up in America and Australia and places like that.”

The premiere was produced through funding by the West Virginia Humanities Council, West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture & History, Arts Council of Ireland and Culture Ireland.