On a beautiful sunny day in Galway's Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Dooley, former choral director of the choir from 1995 to 2011, when it was known as the RTÉ Philharmonic.

It's a very interesting thing.

Choirs are not the sum of their parts, so there's, there's something else that happens.

And when you bring 120 people together with that sort of commitment and that sort of love of the music and that, that, um, absolute sense of, we've gotta do our very, very best, you know, it's not just 120 times that.

There's something else as well.

When all of that comes together, it's an extraordinary thing.

The choir obviously still has that chemistry, that alchemy.

I wanted to hear how our choral directors, past and present, feel standing in front of us, to understand that outside look-in conductors get and what emotional feedback they feel, if any.