Irish conductor Eimear Noone will be first woman to lead orchestra at Oscars ceremony

Galway-born Eimear Noone will conduct excerpts from the five nominated scores at the Oscars ceremony on February 9. She will be the first woman to do so in the history of the televised awards.

Rickey Minor, who conducted the ceremony last year, is expected to conduct the rest of the show. Details on what exactly the presentation will be like are still hazy, sources tell Variety. The themes may be presented as a medley or separately, and it is unclear whether the entire orchestra will be on stage or in the pit. Noone expressed her excitement for the ceremony.

"[How] generous [Minor] is, to hand over this incredibly poignant moment, as these [composers] are my heroes and she-roes, who will be sitting in the audience, whose music I get to interpret," she tells Variety.

Noone is hailed as the first internationally successful female composer from Ireland. She co-founded the Dublin City Concert Orchestra, an ensemble for the performance of film music, and at 22, she became the first woman to conduct at the National Concert Hall. Now, Noone is widely considered as the world's leading conductor of video game scores, having worked on big names like Zelda and World of Warcraft.

The composer and her husband now divide their time between Dublin and California. She conducts 40 to 50 concerts a year around the world with the likes of the Royal Philharmonic of London, Sydney Symphony and National Symphony.

“It’s an honour to be there, to help normalize something that I do every day,” she tells the magazine. “Little girls everywhere will see this and say, ‘I think I’ll do that.’ That’s what we want.”

Thanks to visionary producers Stephanie Allain and Lynette Howell Taylor @TheAcademy and the incredible Rickey Minor, genius music director for the Oscars for inviting me to perform at the Oscars 2020! https://t.co/xh3VzoS0z7 pic.twitter.com/TAowbcYHGy

— Eimear Noone (@eimearnoone) January 23, 2020