An Interview with Máire Ni Chathasaigh (pronounced Moira
Nee Ha-ha-sig)
by Mairéid Sullivan (from the book, Celtic Women
in Music)
It
was announced in Dublin on October 2 that Máire Ni Chathasaigh
is the recipient of the TG4 National Traditional Music Award for Musician
of the Year 2001 (the highest possible honour for a traditional Irish
musician), to be presented at a live televised awards ceremony in the
Cork Opera House on November 17th. (TG4 is Ireland's Irish-language TV
station.) The citation says: "For the excellence and pioneering force
of her music, the remarkable growth she has brought to the music of the
harp & for the positive influence she has had on the young generation
of harpers". The previous three recipients of this award were Matt
Malloy, Tommy Peoples and Mary Bergin, so she's in good company.
BIOGRAPHY
Máire Ní Chathasaigh is "the most interesting &
original player of our Irish Harp today" (Derek Bell). She grew up
in a well-known West Cork musical family and began to play the piano aged
six, the tin-whistle aged ten and the harp aged eleven. Using her knowledge
of the idiom of the living oral Irish tradition, she developed a variety
of new techniques, particularly in relation to ornamentation, with the
aim of establishing an authentically traditional style of harping: she's
been credited with "a single-handed reinvention of the harp".
Her originality was quickly recognized and she made a number of TV and
radio broadcasts as a teenager, going on to win the All-Ireland and Pan-Celtic
Harp Competitions on several occasions in the 1970s. In 1985 she recorded
the first harp album ever to concentrate on traditional Irish dance music,
The New-Strung Harp, described by The Cork Examiner as "an intensely
passionate and intelligent record... a milestone in Irish harp music".
Her unique approach to her instrument has had a profound influence on
a whole generation of Irish harpers.
A book of her harp arrangements The Irish Harper was published by Old
Bridge Music in 1991. 'If Máire weren't around, Irish harping would
be so much the poorer
Her work restores the harp to its true voice"
- The Irish Times.
Her musical partnership with Chris Newman, one of the UKs more revered
acoustic guitarists, made its début at the 1987 Cambridge Folk
Festival. Virtuosic, fascinating, dramatic, original, inspired,
gloriously adventurous, dazzling, brilliant, stunning, impassioned, electrifying,
bewitching, moving, achingly beautiful, influential, revered, unique
are just some of the adjectives which have been used to describe their
music (by The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Irish Times,
The Scotsman and Folk Roots). Theyve played in twenty-one countries
- from the Shetland Islands to New Zealand, from San Francisco to Calabria
- and have given TV & radio performances on five continents. Though
rooted in the Irish tradition, the eclecticism, emotional range and spirit
of adventure of their performances, a breathtaking blend of traditional
Irish & Scottish music, hot jazz, bluegrass & baroque, coupled
with Máires clear, warm & expressive voice
& Chriss subversively witty introductions continue
to ensure a busy performing schedule. The most recent of their four critically
acclaimed albums together Live in the Highlands captures the essence
of these remarkable performers in a rare and priceless way. Absolutely
essential. - Folk Roots.
Máire and Chris are also featured on Celtic Harpestry, a major
Celtic harp album & associated TV special recently released by Polygram
USA & currently listed on the Billboard Chart. The Goldcrest feature
film Driftwood features Máire's singing over the closing credits,
and her harping & compositions feature with other luminaries of the
Celtic music world on the major Sony (France) album Finisterres by Dan
ar Braz et I'Héritage des Celtes, which recently received a Gold
Disc. Missa Celtica, a new work by English composer John Cameron has just
been released on Warner Classics, and features the New English Chamber
Orchestra, the Choir of New College Oxford and a number of soloists -
including Máire, on harp and voice. Shes currently working
intensively on a new solo album.
INTERVIEW with Máire Ní Chathasaigh
M.S. How did you first discover the harp, Máire?
M.NiC.
Well Im not really sure how I did. I grew up in a very musical family.
There has been a very long tradition in both my mothers and my fathers
families. My mother is from Allihies, in West Cork, right at the tip of
the Beara Peninsula. Thats not far from where you come from. Her
mother was ODwyer and she is an OSullivan. There have been
fiddle-players in the O'Dwyer family for the last two hundred years. My
mother and grandmother were singers.
M.S. Someone told me that there arent a lot of the old sean-nós
songs, that are specifically written for women singers, left in Ireland,
because most of the collectors were men collecting from men. I wonder
whether your mother and grandmother knew any of the old Gaelic sean-nós
womens songs, too.
M.NiC. They really didnt seem to me to make a distinction on the
basis of gender. If they liked a song, they sang it regardless of whether
it was a written from the angle of a man or a woman. Thats always
been part of the tradition.
But to get back to your question about how I discovered the harp. My mother
started me playing the piano when I was six. Then I started playing the
fiddle for a while and then the tin whistle. When I was eleven I started
playing the harp. My mother has told me that Id always wanted to
play the harp from the time that I was very small, though Ive got
no memory of this myself my memories of my childhood are quite
patchy really. She says that they could never figure out why the harp,
particularly, or where Id even heard one! So when the opportunity
came up, they bought one for me. Ive discovered since that quite
a few harp players I know had the same experience: theyd always
wanted to play the harp from when they were really tiny. My sister, Nollaig
Casey, and I started the harp at the same time. We both started the fiddle
at the same time as well, but though Ive always loved the fiddle,
I was more drawn to the harp. I just seemed to have a very strong natural
affinity for it and I'm now a professional harper, while Nollaig
was drawn to the fiddle and is now a professional fiddle-player!
On my fathers side of the family, there has been an enormous tradition
of Seanchas (shanahus) which means lore and learning of all kinds: historical
information, genealogical information, heroic tales, poetry. My father
can trace his maternal ancestry, purely in the maternal line, back to
the sixteenth century. That is an oral tradition: it's never been written
down. That is the sort of thing they preserved in my fathers family.
Many of them, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, were poets in the
Irish language. Some of the poems they composed were preserved in the
form of songs, which were still sung in West Cork up until the 1930s.
As a child I remember learning a few of what are often described as "occasional
verses" from my father. I remember learning one in particular, a
humorous extempore verse composed by a nineteenth-century ancestor of
mine, Donncha Óg Ó hIarlaithe, where he pokes fun at his
daughter who liked staying in bed late in the mornings. It was passed
down orally in the family - it's never been written down. It's full of
puns and word play, which dont work so well when translated. Apart
from anything else, it sounds perfectly OK in Irish, but when translated
seems very vulgar all of a sudden! Irish is a very earthy language.
My
fathers grandfather was apparently a very fine singer and the family
tradition is that some songs were collected from him by George Petrie,
the famous nineteenth century collector of traditional music. So, on both
sides of my family theres been a very long tradition of knowledge
of all sorts of Irish artistic activities, like composing poetry, playing
music, preserving historical and genealogical information and lore of
all kinds.
I grew up steeped in this. It wasnt until I was an adult that I
realized how very unusual it is to know so much about your own lineage:
lots of people, even in Ireland, know very little about their background,
their ancestors, where they came from. I think that this feeling of connection
to the past is probably one of the reasons that I feel so passionate about
the music that I play. I feel a very strong affinity and love for all
aspects of the Irish tradition and Irish culture, not just music, inspired
purely by the family I was born into and its long collective memory
a long artistic collective memory which reaches back over two hundred
years. My father himself, although he's a highly literate and learned
man, has an extraordinary memory. It's the sort of memory which was probably
once common in pre-literate societies, but which is now incredibly rare,
probably because its no longer necessary. I remember him once declaiming
a forty-verse poem which hed learned from an old neighbor in the
1930s: hed only heard the poem twice but was able to remember every
word of it! Ive always been completely in awe of this gift, but
unfortunately I havent inherited it. Hes always been a voracious
reader and his extraordinary memory also means that hes forgotten
very little of what hes ever read he told me once that hed
memorized three of Shakespeares plays by the time he was fourteen
years old. On the other hand, hes never been able to remember what
he did yesterday, or where he put his car-keys! Hes now eighty-five
and his memory is not what it used to be its been fading
for the last few years but its still remarkable.
My father grew up in quite a remote part of the parish of Caheragh, between
Skibbereen and Bantry. His family was the last family of native Irish
speakers in the district, because his grandmother was still alive when
he was a little boy: shed lived through the Famine, and wouldnt
allow any English to be spoken in the house because she blamed the English
for the Famine. Thats one of the reasons why so much lore was passed
on.
M.S. I had an aunt over near Caheragh, her maiden name is OSullivan,
and they spoke Irish at home all the time, too. I used to spend my school
holidays there, playing with my cousins.
I wanted to ask you something about your OSullivan family ancestors.
They would have been related to the OSullivan Beara family, from
Cork, who were the last to stand in battle against the English?
M.NiC. Well, the OSullivan Beara clan kept on fighting after the
battle of Kinsale, until they were completely defeated. They never surrendered.
The O'Sullivan Beara's retreat to Leitrim was described in Irish as a
cúl-throid, or "fighting retreat".
M.S. Thats the same family, then. While some of the survivors moved
to Spain and served the Spanish court after their defeat by the English,
I would imagine the remaining members of the family would have been inspired
by a very strong sense to hold on to the culture. Especially since they
were the last ones to lead the battles to preserve it.
M.NiC.
I would imagine, as well, that it would have been possible for the OSullivans
of the Beara Peninsula to keep their culture longer because the terrain
they lived in was very remote and inaccessible. A cousin of mine recently
read the memoirs of an eighteenth century traveler in the Beara peninsula.
This traveller said that hed never come across a people who believed
so much in fairies and the otherworld. When we were growing up, we spent
our holidays every summer with my mothers family in Allihies, and
while we were there, wed always go to visit my great uncle, my grandmothers
brother, Mike ODwyer, who lived across the mountain in Urhan. He
was a great storyteller, he was blind, and he used to tell wonderful stories
about his own encounters with the fairies. As children, our eyes used
to be as big as saucers. We were completely spellbound. And of course
we were excited and frightened too! I still remember the atmosphere in
the house with the family all gathered together around the fire and the
wind howling outside. Sometimes, just out of devilment, Uncle Mike would
make up stories as well, just to frighten us until we heard the
adults all roar laughing! Then we realized we'd been had. All of the older
generation of my relations believed in fairies. They all believed in the
spirit world.
M.S. Thats how it was where I was brought up as well.
M.NiC. Two of my uncles were very psychic and two or three of my cousins
in this generation are psychic too. Psychic ability was very strong in
my mothers family: I think it came from my mothers fathers
side, the OSullivan side. Im quite telepathic and trust my
intuition to guide me in everything, but Im not psychic myself.
One of my brothers is a bit, I think. Funnily enough, hes the one
who physically most resembles the OSullivans. I dont regret
not having the ability: it doesnt always bring happiness.
M.S. What I have learned about that is that it a function of the way you
use your brain vibrations, alpha, beta, etc. Some people learn that and
others are predisposed to being much more open and perceptive, They are
more sensitive. In our rigid world we have a tendency to tighten or narrow
our perceptive focus.
M.NiC. Those born with a natural talent are more open to it. So, from
both sides of my family, that is the sort of background I came from. It
is very much linked to the past. I had a very rich cultural setting for
the development of my talents.
M.S. Was the Catholic Church very strong in your family?
M.NiC. Its a completely natural part of everybodys life in
Ireland.
M.S. Is it separate from the other beliefs they held on to?
M.NiC. No it isnt. It could perhaps be interpreted as an extension
of the ancient belief in the otherworld and the associated belief in the
centrality of a spiritual dimension to life that we were just talking
about. Several members of my mother's extended family were nuns and priests,
which is probably not accidental. I have an aunt who's a nun, a very serene
and spiritual person, who's also quite psychic I think.
Christianity in Ireland is shot through with all sorts of other beliefs
that have nothing to do with Christianity. Most people in Ireland think
they are Christian beliefs. At least the old people thought they were.
In fact, they are pre-Christian beliefs that are completely wound up with
Catholicism. If you actually examine them you will find that they have
nothing to do with the Church at all, but the people, themselves, are
convinced that they are.
Celtic Christianity developed in its own way over many centuries in relative
isolation, incorporating within it many aspects of a pre-Christian, pagan
Celtic belief system, before it was made to conform to Roman practices
in the 12th century - though even then it was never completely stamped
out. Because Celtic Christianity was so inclusive of all sorts of ancient
beliefs, these beliefs were remarkably tenacious and survived in Ireland
until the twentieth century.
The rigidity that is associated with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Irish Church is a post-Famine phenomenon, a reaction to the severe psychological
trauma inflicted on the whole country by the Famine. People were terrified
that it might happen again. Whereas before the Famine most people married
young, after it, people were afraid that they mightn't be able to feed
their children. So very often only one member of the family inherited
the land and married and had children. The other siblings either remained
unmarried on the family farm or emigrated in the hope of earning enough
money to be able to marry. The Irish people were never puritanical; the
Irish language is not a puritanical language, even today. The Puritanism
that some people associate with the Irish Church is an extremely recent
thing, which developed purely as a consequence of the Famine; it was aided
and abetted of course by the huge decline in the Irish language after
the Famine. When people became more exposed to English they also became
more exposed to the stifling influence of Victorian England. Puritanism
wasn't a cultural feature of pre-Famine Ireland. It's interesting that
if you speak to native Irish speakers they'll express themselves in Irish
with enormous freedom, in a way that they never would in English. The
freedom of expression characteristic of the Irish language is not acceptable
in English, even today. Irish is a very earthy language and the Irish
people were very earthy, but spiritual too.
M.S. Do you think the traditional music is affected by that stoical restriction?
M.NiC. Oh no! Well certainly not now. During the heyday of the puritanical
phase of the Irish Church in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some
puritanical priests put a stop to crossroads dancing and house dances.
The great collector of Irish traditional dance-music, Francis O'Neill,
who, like my father, was born in the parish of Caheragh, was full of resentment
about this. He says in his book, Irish Minstrels and Musicians, that a
piper he knew in the parish who made his living from playing for dances
was thrown into poverty as a result of the ban and ended his days in the
workhouse, and that a number of other musicians he knew emigrated out
of despair. But Irish people have always had a great joie de vivre, a
great delight in being alive which can never be repressed for long. Neither
the trauma of the Famine nor clerical misguidedness managed to crush their
spirit completely: the minute it got a chance again it bubbled up. So,
no. I dont think it has affected the music long-term. Obviously
a lot of musicians must have died in the Famine and thousands more emigrated.
The music could have died, but miraculously, it never did.
M.S. What do you think is the source of that natural spring of energy,
that joie de vivre, as you say?
M.NiC. It was always there, but there have been an awful lot of traumas
in the last few hundred years of Irish history which have repressed it
for a while. The Cromwellian wars were very traumatic, the forced movements
of population and the huge massacres. For example in 1649 thirty thousand
people just in Drogheda, were put to the sword by Cromwells soldiers.
The Penal Laws were appalling. Things calmed down for a bit and then came
the Famine, the most recent large-scale trauma. The Irish psyche has always
recovered and bubbled to the surface again. The current generation is
now back not normal, you could say. Irish culture, in itself,
has always been very expressive, very free, and very unfettered, very
unrepressed. Sometimes you meet people who, in themselves, are damaged
by very rigid nuns or priests who taught them, thirty or forty years ago.
They have blamed the Church for ruining their lives. That doesnt
mean anything to me, really, because I grew up after The Second Vatican
Council. I think there is an enormous difference between people who grew
up after and before The Second Vatican Council. That is because the whole
way of approaching religion completely changed. Hell didnt mean
anything to me when I was growing up. The way religion was taught before
that was very authoritative, whereas after, it was much looser and freer.
It was much more participative. There was much less fear. So, I dont
associate the Church with being afraid. My view of it is as a benign force,
not a malign force. People, who are twenty years older than me, in their
sixties, who talk about how they were mistreated and damaged by the Christian
Brothers, etc., might as well be talking about two hundred years ago,
as far as I am concerned. That bore no relationship to the way I grew
up. It doesn't mean of course that I want to belittle their pain in any
way.
There has always been, in Irish culture, an enormous exuberance of spirit
which external events have crushed from time to time, but weve always
bounced back from that because our culture is so incredibly strong: The
springs of creativity in us are so strong. A part of our whole identity
as people is a creative identity. Creativeness is completely central to
who we are.
I do an enormous amount of travelling and I have not seen any other country
where the ability to do something artistic is so highly valued. I live
in England now, and though we are very successful in what we do, this
societys view of musicians is that they are not perceived to be
appreciated as much as in Ireland, where an artist is revered. If you
are a musician, you are down a bit in the social pecking order, rather
than up at the top.
M.S. Wouldnt that be related to the royal hierarchy?
M.NiC. No, its not that, actually. Its something extremely
fundamental. You see, in early Irish society, as among other Celtic peoples,
the file or poet had the same status as the king. The word file originally
meant a seer or wise man, and the file retained some of the prestige of
the druid. In the very earliest times, the druids were the highest class
in society, just like the Brahmins were in India. Because the poets had
a very high status in society, what they said was revered. In the earliest
periods they were considered to have the ability to bless or curse. In
the mediaeval period every chieftain had his own hereditary professional
court poet, whose main function was to praise the deeds of his chieftain
in panegyric or praise poems. The poet could, equally, if he didnt
like what the chieftain was doing, write an aor or satire,
to criticize the king or chieftain. In the earliest periods, this was
considered to have the power of a curse. So, the power of the word and
of the creative person producing new words was enormous. That is a very,
very ancient tradition.
The harpers had a very high status in society as well, but not as high
as the poets did. Whereas in the earliest times the poets had the same
status as the kings, the harpers were freemen - the only class of musicians
who were allowed to become freemen! The word was always the main thing
in Ireland. All of the descriptions of Celtic society talk of their love
of poetry and their love of music. It is intrinsic to our sense of ourselves.
There was a high-ranking Norman/Welsh monk called Giraldus Cambrensis,
whose uncle Maurice Fitzgerald was one of the principal leaders of the
Norman invasion of Ireland, who visited Ireland in 1185 in the retinue
of Prince John, the youngest son of King Henry II of England. While he
was there he wrote Topographia Hiberniae (The History and Topography of
Ireland) which is very interesting. He didn't travel very widely in Ireland,
so some of what he wrote is based on hearsay, and of course it's colored
by the fact that he came to Ireland with a conqueror. He was very credulous
and seems to have believed every tall tale he was told by the locals!
Maybe he thought he was such a superior being that he couldn't believe
that anyone would dare to pull his leg. It's always in the interest of
conquerors to disparage those who are being conquered. Giraldus's natural
tendency would be to disparage everything he saw. He thought we were a
barbarous people, with far too great a love of leisure and liberty, who
spent ridiculous amounts of time listening to music and poetry. He thought
this was a waste of time. What he said was absolutely true of the native
Irish aristocracy, who despised manual labor. They believed in using the
lower orders and plenty of slaves to do all the donkey-work, leaving them
free to devote their time to the finer things in life, like making and
appreciating art of all kinds.
Slavery was apparently so widespread that the Irish bishops at a 12th
century synod in Armagh came to the conclusion that the Norman invasion
was the judgement of God on the Irish for their purchase and enslavement
of English people! Kind of ironic really. Anyway, Giraldus disparaged
plenty, but one of the few positive things he said is that he had never
seen harpers to compare with the Irish harpers. He said he'd never heard
such accomplished playing, anywhere. He described the music of the harp
as being highly ornamented and as being of an extraordinarily high standard.
Giraldus was actually a very sophisticated person, who had studied in
Paris and was familiar with all of the most advanced European literary
and artistic movements. The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was the center
of the avant-garde in music at the time, what is known as the Ars Antiqua,
"old art". This makes his testimony absolutely fascinating and
very valuable to us today. He wasnt an ignorant observer. And since
his natural tendency would have been to disparage rather than praise,
the harpers he heard must have been truly extraordinary.
This love of ornament and decoration, which is very characteristic of
Irish music, still, to this day, has a very long history. Its part of
how we want to express ourselves. Its completely part of us. I think
creativity has never happened just by chance in Irish society. I think
Ireland, by its very nature, has nurtured artists because it has always
appreciated them. Youll find in even the smallest place, with people
who have never been anywhere, that they adore music. They have the greatest
regard for creative artists of any kind.
M.S.
It is so satisfying to hear that you have found that evidence. Let me
ask you about your harp. What kind of strings do you use on your harp?
M.NiC. Its a nylon string harp. The harp that I play is, strictly
speaking, a neo-Irish harp. It looks like the ancient Irish harp but it
is strung with nylon strings. It can also be strung with gut strings.
M.S. Have you tried both sounds?
M.NiC. I specifically like the nylon. Ill tell you why. When I was
in my early teens, Id already been playing the whistle and the fiddle
and lots of different things. I grew up playing both traditional and classical
music, side by side. But what I wanted to do is play traditional music
on the harp. I wanted to play dance music on the harp, which hadnt
been done before. At that point in Ireland, the harp was used mainly as
accompaniment to songs. There were hardly any harp teachers outside of
Dublin. There was nobody decent at all outside Dublin, actually. The harp
had become very much an urban instrument. It had become completely disassociated
with the oral tradition, with people who played music in the countryside.
The people who played dance music and slow airs, who were part of the
oral tradition, learnt the music orally.
The old Irish harpers played for an aristocratic clientele. A lot of their
music has survived in various collections, but it's very complex and sophisticated
and technically extremely demanding and it's not very accessible really:
it sounds a little strange to modern ears. It doesnt sound like
what we now think of as Irish music. Another large chunk of the music
they played has survived in the oral tradition; for example the really
famous Irish airs like "The Derry Air" were almost certainly
composed by harpers. Most of these airs, like a lot of the current music
associated with Ireland, go back only two or three centuries and not further.
The harpers didnt play dance music at all; in fact they would have
looked down their noses at people who played dance music because that
was the music of the people.
But that is what I always wanted to do because that is the tradition I
grew up in. I was playing the Uilleann pipes, which is an instrument that
Ive always loved and which was my main inspiration. What I wanted
to do was to develop a way of playing that music on the harp, so in my
early teens I started developing the necessary new techniques of fingering
and ornamentation. I've been teaching people how to play dance music on
the harp since the mid-seventies. There are people who have learnt from
people whove learnt from people who have learnt from me a long time
ago. So now, there are hundreds of young harpers in Ireland, and elsewhere,
who use the techniques that I developed, and their own variants of them,
which is great.
M.S. You were the forerunner of that approach.
M.NiC. Yes. But to get back to your question about the nylon strings,
I started playing on gut strings. The second harp my parents bought for
me, when I was thirteen, was a Japanese-made harp. A Japanese man called
Kunzo Aoyama started to make nylon-strung Irish harps in the late sixties.
They also had thirty-four strings and a new, improved, way of changing
key, using up-and-down semi-tone levers. It was a much better system than
the one that was there before, much more suitable for instrumental music.
I thought it was absolutely fantastic. It was the sound of the nylon that
made me think I could make dance music work on this instrument. I couldnt
have made it work on the gut-strung harp I had before, because gut has
a very mellow sound which, of course, is lovely if you want to accompany
songs and play slow music. If you want to play very fast dance music,
which has a lot of ornamentation, you need a much brighter sound, and
the nylon provided a very bright sound. So, that was the sound I was looking
for.
M.S. Did you find yourself playing the harp in sessions.
M.NiC. Yes, when I was a kid. I was a very shy teenager. I didnt
like to play for people unless I was asked.
M.S. So your desire to play dance music wasnt actually related to
your wish to play with everyone else.
M.NiC. No. It was nothing to do with that. It was more a personal, artistic
aim, for its own sake. I had always played with other people but not on
the harp. I always played the whistle in sessions and that. You don't
attract so much attention, which suited me fine! I would venture to say
that I find playing the harp with lots of other musicians, to be very
frustrating. I dont feel I am contributing anything because I dont
make enough noise. I always enjoyed playing with, maybe, a couple of other
people. Then it has an artistic purpose and you're interacting in a very
creative way.
M.S. How did people react when they heard dance music on the harp for
the first time?
M.NiC. I remember when I first entered the under fourteen All-Ireland
Fleadh Cheoil. Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann organizes
the Fleadh Cheoils every year. I got an awful lot of encouragement from
people I met at that time. People said they'd never thought they'd see
the day that they'd hear dance music on the harp. A lot of older traditional
musicians, at that time, thought the harp was a useless instrument, that
you couldnt play anything decent on it. But once they heard what
I was trying to do they were immensely supportive and full of praise and
encouragement. They gave me the confidence to develop what I was doing
even further. There isn't of course anything at all wrong with the harp,
in itself, as a means of playing traditional music in an authentic style.
You just have to know the traditional music, you have to grow up with
it and be immersed in that style. Otherwise you're not going to play the
right thing. It doesnt matter how good you are if you dont
know the style. I grew up with the style and then developed the techniques
to transfer the sound I heard in my head onto the harp-strings.
M.S. You had the instrument that would allow you to play the music efficiently.
M.NiC. Yes. So, from then on I entered a lot of Fleadh Cheoils. I won
a lot of the competitions and got a lot of attention, because what I was
doing was very new. I appreciated that because when I was growing up I
was extremely shy. A lot of musicians, when interviewed disparage the
whole idea of competitions. I actually think that I would still be playing
to myself in my own front room if I hadnt entered those competitions.
At that time, it really wasnt the done thing for females to put
themselves forward. Male musicians have always been able to go into a
place and ask for gigs. At that time a female couldnt do that. Its
still more difficult for young females, though it's delightful to see
how much more confident the new young generation of female traditional
musicians is by comparison with my own.
M.S. When were you a teenager?
M.NiC. In the early seventies. If you enter a competition, as a girl,
and you win, basically it's an objective validation of what youve
done. Somebody else has said you are good. You dont have to say
it yourself. You dont have to push yourself, which a nicely brought
up young girl is not supposed to do. Even still, if you grew up in that
way, you can never really overcome that.
M.S. That is certainly true still.
M.NiC.
There are some people who are born pushy but most women are not, if they
are brought up in a particular way. In England, I am often asked, Why
are there such enormous numbers of really wonderful Irish female musicians?
There have been for the last thirty or forty years. I think one of the
reasons is that the whole competition system brought a lot of female musicians
to prominence when they were in their teens. A purely objective assessment
is made that you are the winner, the best, so the whole musical culture
hears about you. It benefited us females enormously. It brought us to
prominence without ourselves having to say that we were brilliant. It
gave a great boost to our self-esteem in those shaky teenage years and
the confidence to develop our talents even further.
Sometimes youll hear people, almost always men, disparaging the
whole competition system. This annoys me as I think it's been of enormous
benefit to women in Ireland.
M.S. So, if you were good, people would come to find you.
M.NiC. Absolutely, I didnt enter to win, necessarily, those events
also provided a very important social function. But, if you did win people
would seek you out.
M.S. I remember a poll taken in Dublin in 1976/77, and the tin whistle
was voted the most popular instrument in Ireland. Gael Linn obviously
realized they had to put an album of tin whistle music out. They approached
Mary Bergin and released her first recording of music on the tin whistle.
She said they found her through the competitions.
M.NiC. Mary Bergin's the best tin whistle player in Ireland. She's a phenomenal
musician, an amazing musician. It's interesting that she agrees with me
about the competitions giving us a forum. But, as well as that, the annual
trip to the Fleadh Cheoil, (music festival) was a fantastic thing for
children growing up in the country. I grew up in Bandon, which is very
Anglicized. There was no traditional music played there at all. In fact
we used to be laughed at for playing traditional music. It was so unfashionable
- something that is hard to imagine these days, when Irish music is so
fashionable all over the world it seems. Our familys big, enormous
treat of the year was to go to the All-Ireland Fleadh Cheoil, because
there we would meet so many other musicians of our own age and interests.
It was our big social event of the year. Our excuse was that we had the
competitions to go into but they werent the real reason for our
excitement. The Fleadh had an enormous social influence: it was like a
yearly validation that we weren't complete freaks!
M.S. Where are you, today, in terms of your vision of what the past has
brought you to and where you want to go with that understanding?
M.NiC. I keep working, especially on the older music. I do a lot of composition
these days. My first solo album was in 1985. Ive done four recordings
since, with Chris Newman. I am working on another solo album, at the moment,
completely solo. And of course I love performing. I get great pleasure
out of giving people pleasure. We do a lot of touring.
My original mission in life was, I suppose, to reintegrate the harp into
the oral Irish tradition, from which it had become separated in the last
few centuries. That is very much the case now, and that is an enormous
change.
I have always felt a mission to explain Irish music, not just to non-Irish
people, but also to other Irish people. Given half a chance, I will expound
my theories to anybody (laughter). I try to explain why Irish musicians
play the way they do and what the actual aesthetic of the music is. A
lot of people involved in Irish music play, but they cant really
explain why they do what they do, very well. So, I feel it is necessary
to explain. If somebody asks me I simply launch into it.
M.S. Please, go ahead, the floor is yours.
M.NiC. My central belief about Irish music is connected to my belief about
Irish society, which I was talking about earlier on. It is that Irish
music has always been a miniature art. If you think of the music of Beethoven
as a landscape painting: his music is painted in broad strokes so that
you have long crescendos and diminuendos. In comparison, Irish music is
like a miniature painting. There are huge changes of dynamics within one
bar of music. Some people think there are no dynamics in Irish music.
If you take a reel for example, its seems the same from beginning
to end. In fact, there are enormous changes but they all happen on a tiny
scale. The overall sound seems the same from start to finish, but it isnt.
It changes all the time. A really, really good traditional musician will
never play the same thing twice in the same way. There will always be
a slight change. But it will be done in a very, very subtle way. Subtlety
is completely central to the whole Irish aesthetic. For the Irish, artistry
equals subtlety, basically. One of the descriptions, from the earliest
times, of the art of the Irish poets states that, to them, art that conceals
art is the greatest of all. It was true of the Irish poets in the eighth
century; it was true of the harpers described by Giraldus Cambrensis,
in the twelfth century.
Ive actually got the book, which quotes the twelfth century monk,
Giraldus Cambrensis, right here. Ill read it to you. This is the
translation from the Latin.
The movement is not, as in the British instrument to which we are
accustomed, slow and easy, but rather quick and lively, while at the same
time the melody is sweet and pleasant. It is remarkable how, in spite
of the great speed of the fingers, the musical proportion is maintained.
The melody is kept perfect and full with unimpaired art through everything...
with a rapidity that charms, a rhythmic pattern that is varied, and a
concord achieved through elements discordant. They harmonize at intervals
of the octave and the fifth
They glide so subtly from one mode to
another, and the grace notes so freely sport with such abandon and bewitching
charm around the steady tone of the heavier sound, that the perfection
of their art seems to lie in their concealing it, as if 'it were the better
for being hidden. An art revealed brings shame.'
M.S. Is it that the Irish have hidden their ancient aesthetics under the
current of the mainstream, and that it still is perceivably active?
M.NiC. The whole Irish cultural aesthetic is to venerate the subtle over
the obvious. The Irish cultural consciousness has always revered subtlety.
Before the Irish were ever under threat from an outside power they revered
the subtle. Its a very ancient thing; it has nothing to do with
what has happened to us.
Giraldus goes on to say:
Hence it happens that the very things that afford unspeakable delight
to the minds of those who have a fine perception and can penetrate carefully
to the secrets of the art, bore, rather than delight, those who have no
such perception - who look without seeing, and hear without being able
to understand. When the audience is unsympathetic, they succeed only in
causing boredom with what appears to be but confused and disordered noise.
What this is basically saying is that to be able to appreciate the music
of the harpers, you need to be educated in that music: that it was a very
subtle art which needs to be appreciated. People, who really, really know
and can penetrate the art, experience an unspeakable delight on hearing
it. The same is actually true of a traditional fiddle player, for example,
in the twentieth century, especially of the older traditional musicians.
If you hear them describing music, what they really respect in other musicians,
is subtlety. Not obviousness, not variations that jump up and scream at
you, as if to say, I am a variation, look how brilliant I am.
What they absolutely love, in the playing of other musicians, is subtlety.
It's interesting that that should be as true of musicians of the twentieth
century as it was of the harpers in the twelfth century. That whole view
of the nature of art is very ancient and very Irish. In the case of the
visual arts, just look at the old and very, very beautiful jewelry that
was made two to three thousand years ago. Likewise, objects like the Ardagh
Chalice, the Tara Brooch and the Book of Kells, which were produced in
the eighth century, when Irish art reached a peak of virtuosity. All the
illuminated manuscripts produced from the 6th century onwards were highly
ornamented, but the Book of Kells, which was the most famous illuminated
manuscript of all, was extraordinarily lavishly ornamented. But again,
you look at a page and the whole looks beautiful but it is so detailed
that even if you look at one tiny bit by itself it'll have something interesting
to say. For example, a tiny little figure inside a Capital letter might
be doing something interesting. Thats very much, again, a miniature
art. And, again, subtlety is exalted over the obvious. Giraldus Cambrensis
described the Book of Kells as being "the work, not of men, but of
angels".
M.S. Have you looked into the history of those manuscripts at all? Someone
was saying that those books are a hybrid of eastern and western design.
M.NiC. Well yes, though their motifs show striking parallels with Irish
jewelry and metalwork. Irish monasteries seem to have kept in close contact
with the very earliest monastic foundations, those of the Near East, particularly
Egypt and Syria. One characteristic feature of the Irish manuscripts,
which was also found in Egyptian Coptic manuscripts, is the surrounding
of capital letters with decorative red dots. It's been a feature of Irish
manuscripts since at least the 6th century and appears at about the same
time in Byzantine manuscripts. The extraordinarily beautiful "carpet
pages" also seem to have been inspired by Coptic models. What is
interesting, of course, is that Celtic society, particularly Irish society,
preserves a way of life which is very ancient. The Romans never conquered
Ireland, so it was able to preserve its Celtic culture in a pure form.
The Celtic languages are a part of the Indo-European family of languages.
One of the interesting things to observe is that the structure of ancient
Aryan society in India, which is described in the Rig-Veda, is the same
as the structure of society described by the early Irish writers. So that,
in a way, Ireland preserved a very ancient form of society, shared with
the ancestors of both the Indian culture and the Celtic culture.
M.S. The Vedas, are said to have been taken to the East, to India, fifteen
hundred years BC.
M.NiC. The Indo-European peoples are said to have originated in the steppes
of southern Russia, between the Caucasus and the Carpathian Mountains
and spread from there east to India and west to Europe. They're supposed
to have reached Central Europe around 3000 BC and the Punjab in India
between 3000 and 1500 BC. Presumably they brought the Vedas with them
to India. Ireland has always been consciously conservative; I mean that
in the positive sense of preserving things from the past. Preserving a
type of society. The society described in the old Irish law tracts is
a very ancient type of society, which is also described in the early Indian
tracts. It isnt because Irish society was based on Aryan society
in India. It is that ancient Indian and Celtic societies were both the
descendents of an original Indo-European society.
M.S. Well said.
M.NiC. Thank you. There are some parallels between the Book of Kells and
the art of the Middle East, but that doesn't mean that one directly influenced
the other. I dont think its as simple as that. The exaltation
of the subtle and the importance of ornament are two things that go back
a long way in Irish society. The Continental Celts were very much admired
by the Romans for their eloquence and their polished and artistic speech.
If you look at Irish poetry, it's very clear that it's always been very
highly ornamented, even when the structure changed drastically at various
times. There was enormous change in Irish society after the defeat of
the Irish at the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. Later in the seventeenth century
came the Cromwellian wars, which caused one of the real seismic shifts
in Ireland. In the hundred years after 1601 eighty-five percent of Irish
land was forcibly transferred into the hands of the new English colonists
and the old Irish aristocratic order collapsed. The chieftains were no
longer in a position to support either harpers or poets in the style to
which they had become accustomed.
The poets then had to change the style of poetry they composed, practically
totally. The harpers changed what they played, also, because now, in very
short order, they had to find new audiences. Because the music and the
poetry were actually aimed, very much, at a cultured and learned audience,
they now had to aim what they were doing at everybody, so they had to
change what they did quite drastically. The court poets of the medieval
period, and right down to the seventeenth century, composed mainly praise
poetry, but it was extremely formal. They used a lot of very complex meters,
for example. The used complex forms of word ornament. They also used a
standardized language.
Thats an interesting thing, which shows the continuity and conservatism
of Irish society. From the twelfth to the end of the sixteenth century
the Irish language, the Gaelic language, was standardized in grammar and
spelling. It was the first standardized vernacular (non-Latin) language
in Europe. It was standardized in grammar and spelling long before English
was, for example. This language was used by the learned classes and poets
both in Ireland and in Gaelic speaking Scotland. A poet writing in Gaelic
in twelfth century Scotland would be completely understood by someone
writing in Ireland in the sixteenth century, because they used exactly
the same language, the same grammar and spelling.
Old Irish and Modern Irish seem quite a long way apart, but you can see
how the language developed quite clearly. The earliest surviving examples
of written Old Irish are in the form of glosses, or explanations written
by an Irish monk in the margins of a manuscript of the Gospels in Latin,
which is preserved in the library of the cathedral of St Gallen in Switzerland.
The monks also wrote some lovely poems in the margins when they got bored
with copying out Gospels. There's one particularly sweet one, which a
monk wrote about the antics of his cat, Pangur Bán.
St. Gallen is an Irish Medieval settlement, a monastic foundation of St
Gall, built during the Dark Ages. After the fall of the old Roman Empire,
civilization collapsed in Europe, even royal families became illiterate
and knowledge of the ancient learning of Greece and Rome practically disappeared.
Irish monks re-civilized Europe between the sixth and the eighth centuries
by founding monasteries and teaching all over Europe. St Columbanus founded
a monastery in Bobbio, south of Milan, around 590; St Gall was one of
his disciples. St Colmcille founded the monastery of Iona in Scotland
in about 561. Irish missionary work in England began with the foundation
of an abbey at Lindisfarne by St Aidan who came from Iona in 635. Another
Irishman, St Killian, was a missionary at Würzburg in Germany, where
he was martyred in 689. And so on, etc.
M.S. Tell us more about the poets?
M.NiC. As I said earlier on, after the collapse of the old Irish order
in the seventeenth century, the poets abandoned writing in the standardized,
classical language in order to compose poetry in the language of the people,
the dialects of the regions they lived in. The structure of the poetry
they started to compose changed completely as well. Instead of the very
formal court poetry, which was based on the number of syllables in the
line, and complex schemes of rhyme and alliteration, they started to write
poetry, which had more of a song meter. They abandoned the syllabic poetry.
Even though the whole form of the poetry changed, it retained the very
beautiful, very musical, very highly ornate style. The importance of ornament
was retained. The very same thing happened with the harp music. The famous
harper, Turlough O'Carolan, exemplifies this transitional period in music.
His music is a hybrid of the more ancient Irish court music and the music
that was popular in contemporary Europe, the music of the baroque style.
Again, the harpers wanted to make their music accessible to the new landowners,
who were of English origin and, of course, to the ordinary people as well.
But they retained their love for ornamentation and variation, and for
subtlety in expression. Even though the forms changed over the centuries,
the bedrock of the tradition never changed. Thats why I believe
there is a specifically Irish aesthetic. Its an aesthetic, which
reveres the subtle over the obvious, and is expressed in every art form.
The artistic impulse has remained the same down through the ages.
One of the things that worry me slightly is that this aesthetic may not
survive modern methods of mass communication and the drive towards homogeneity
in music. This applies even within traditional music, with everybody hearing
the same thing, played over and over, the same way, on recordings. It
runs against the individualism, which is very much part of the Irish tradition.
The harp and the Uilleann pipes are solo instruments in the tradition.
They are about an individual making an artistic statement. The modern
world obscures this slightly, but it is still very much there. There's
still an enormous number of discriminating listeners to Irish music who
will prefer hearing a solo player, to hearing a bunch of people playing
together, because then you can really hear the variations going on and
thats what they look for in the individual interpretation.
I feel that this whole perception of the nature of the music, of why musicians
do what they do, is seen in so many other Irish art forms and goes back
so far, that it is central to who we are. I say this over and over again
because I really believe it. My primary aim is to draw people into the
music in a more meaningful and deeper way, so that they can hear beyond
the surface.
This interview is an excerpt
from Mairéid Sullivan's book, Celtic Women in Music.
Reprinted with the permission of the author. Please click
here to find out more about this
fascinating book. |
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Máire Ní Chathasaigh DISCOGRAPHY
Máire Ní Chathasaigh (solo)
The New Strung Harp, Temple Records 1985
Máire Ní Chathasaigh & Chris Newman
The Living Wood, Old Bridge Music 1988
Out Of Court, Old Bridge Music 1991
The Carolan Albums, Old Bridge Music 1994
Live In the Highlands, Old Bridge Music 1995
COMPILATIONS
The 5th Irish Folk Festival, Wundertüte (Germany), 1978
The Best of the Irish Folk Festival, Wundertüte (Germany), 1988
The Best of the Irish Folk Festival Volume 2, Wundertüte (Germany),
1989
Bringing it All Back Home, Hummingbird Records, 1991
A Celtic Treasure, Narada Media (USA), 1996
L'Imaginaire Irlandais, Keltia Musique (France), 1997
Finisterres: Dan ar Braz et l'Héritage des Celtes, Sony (France),
1997
Celtic Harpestry, Imaginary Road Records (USA), 1998
Also voice and harp soloist on Missa Celtica by John Cameron, released
on Warner Classics.
Website:http:// www.oldbridgemusic.com |