O'Connor (Glasgow), Terry (1897–1983), musician and music teacher, was born Mary Teresa O'Connor on 14 October 1897 in Johnstown, Waterford city, the second among at least four daughters of James O'Connor, grocer and vintner, and Brigid O'Connor (née Keirsey). Educated at the Ursuline convent, Waterford, and Loreto college, St Stephen's Green, Dublin, she also studied violin at the RIAM. She worked as a full-time cinema musician, and performed at the 1922 Irish Race Convention in Paris, appearing in concerts in the Salle Gaveau. Shortly after the launch of the Irish national broadcasting service, Radio 2RN (January 1926), she was added as violinist and leader to the embryonic station ‘orchestra’ (essentially a piano quartet), which had evolved out of Clery's Instrumental Trio (so called from their having played in the restaurant of the O'Connell St. department store), the other pieces being piano, viola, and cello (played by O'Connor's sister Viola). She remained as orchestra leader through reconstitution of the service as Radio Éireann (1937), and through several expansions by which the number of permanent musicians increased to forty by 1942. O'Connor married (4 December 1928) David Glasgow (d. 1960), an engineer; they had one son and one daughter. Retaining her maiden stage name, she withstood several attempts to effect her resignation as a married woman, normally enforceable for civil service appointments.
Though O'Connor led the station orchestra in its first public symphony concert in the Metropolitan Hall, Lower Abbey St. (26 November 1927), under the baton of Vincent O'Brien (qv), for many years the orchestra – augmented when necessary by cinema and army musicians – concentrated almost exclusively on studio broadcasts, with occasional public accompaniment of opera and oratorio; sporadic public performances of symphonic music in this period proved commercially disappointing. O'Connor as leader was frequently distressed by the propensity of added musicians to slip out of the studio to neighbouring public houses at intervals in the performance, never knowing when or in what condition they would return. She was closely associated with the orchestra's conductor, Michael Bowles (qv), in the remarkably successful series of fortnightly public symphony concerts (in which she was often the featured soloist) that began in 1941, firstly in the Mansion House round room, and then (from 1943) in the Capitol theatre, Prince's St., thereby helping to cultivate an audience for live symphonic music in Dublin. She made a similar contribution as co-founder (1938) and frequent conductor of the Dublin String Orchestra, through which, in performances in the RDS and the Gresham hotel, and occasional radio broadcasts, she introduced to Irish audiences the music of contemporary international composers such as Rachmaninov, Britten, Bartók, and Schoenberg, and premiered works by such Irish composers as Arthur Duff (qv), Brian Boydell (qv), J. F. Larchet (qv), and Frederick May (qv).
After resigning from the RÉ orchestra in 1945, O'Connor engaged in teaching and free-lance conducting. A licentiate of both the Royal Academy of Music and Trinity College of Music, London, she was professor of orchestra at the RIAM (1948) and at the College of Music (1954–64), and a member of the board of examiners, Department of Education, and of the council of the RDS. She was musical director and frequent conductor of both the Rathmines and Rathgar, and the Glasnevin musical societies, and of many other local societies, and twice toured America (1955, 1963). She contributed an essay on ‘The string player in Ireland’ to the symposium Music in Ireland (1952). A feis ceoil gold medallist in violin, piano, and singing, she was examiner at feiseanna throughout Ireland, and sat on the movement's executive and music committee; a trophy named in her honour is awarded annually at the feis ceoil. She resided at 21 Alma Rd, Monkstown, Co. Dublin. She died 15 September 1983 at Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross, Dublin, and was buried in Deansgrange cemetery.