Letters
- Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland
Dr Barra Boydell, Co-General Editor, Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, writes:
I write on behalf of the editors and publishers of the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland to express our surprise that you saw fit in the March-April issue of JMI to publish Barra Ó Séaghdha’s hypothetical, negative criticism of the Encyclopaedia in the form of a personal diatribe against one of the general editors. It will be some time yet before the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland appears in print and until that time I would suggest that Mr Ó Séaghdha is in no position to pass judgement or comment on the contents of a project about which he has no detailed knowledge.
- Traditional Music in a Music Education Movement
Gay McKeon, CEO, Na Píobairí Uilleann, Dublin 1, writes:
Traditional Irish music is, for a variety of reasons, often banished to the margins of mainstream music debate. Despite the growth of its status in the arts community and its global popularity, it is often dismissed as inferior or simplistic, particularly by those involved in other art forms or classical music. Therefore, it is not surprising that the Irish second-level curriculum reflects the views of those who shape formal music education in this country.
Despite the fact that there is an increasing number of proficient traditional musicians sitting the Leaving Certificate annually, the portion of the syllabus concerning traditional music is wholly insufficient and does not account, in any discernable way, for the richness and innovative quality of traditional music. The linear structure and repetitive form are often cited as reasons for its perceived lowly esteem in comparison to classical music. However, it is obvious that few classical musicians or indeed those charged with establishing formal music education in Ireland understand the unique accent of traditional music. There is no ‘standard’ to refer to and part of its integral quality is the creativity which is expected of the individual player, a fact not often understood by examiners.
There is no doubt that there are many tunes in the body of traditional music that rank alongside classical compositions in terms of structural quality and credibility. ‘The Gold Ring’, ‘The Salamanca’, ‘Jenny’s Welcome to Charlie’ are examples of melodies that would, I believe, hold their own with any classical melodies in the music classroom.
The rigid approach to teaching classical music, the graded exam structure and formal appreciation courses, cannot be applied to the teaching of traditional music which has, essentially, been well-served by the historical method of transmission.
Ironically, many traditional musicians who were also educated under the formal system, particularly students of the violin, have little difficulty applying the acquired skills to the traditional form because they understand the latter’s unique accent. The virtuosity of Seán Maguire and Seán Keane are perfect examples of musicians who harnessed the formal technique and used it to embellish their traditional craft. This rarely happens in reverse as many classical musicians do not understand the interpretive approach to the written melody.
Traditional-music organisations such as Na Píobairí Uilleann and Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann and the major summer schools, in particular Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy, have provided organised classes for decades, but these have never achieved the status of ‘formal education’. While this situation may suit the status quo and the Department of Education, it does not excuse the obvious vacuum that exists in the second-level syllabus. Nor should it prohibit the movement for organisations such as NPU and CCÉ to develop some formal educational structures either within the educational system or in addition to it.
The fact that this has not occurred to date is due in part to the fact that traditional-music organisations have never really regarded their tuition as ‘formal education’, despite the fact that it is often extensive. This is probably our own fault and reflects the fact that traditional musicians would be naturally suspicious of a ‘standard’ or any structures that could restrict their innovative approach. Tuition has also been confused with promotion and there has been a tendency to play a crude numbers game. It is also to do with, I believe, the sharp focus given to accompanying instrumentation, often in an attempt to make traditional music more palatable to a wider audience. This only serves to blur the lines, making it more difficult to discern the key elements which make traditional Irish music unique.
Solo instrumental playing is the cornerstone of this art form and it shaped its evolution. The geographical isolation of a lot of players, even in the twentieth century, encouraged a rich creativity, one that probably deserves a formal recognition in our children’s classrooms.
The teaching profession is favoured by many traditional musicians and there are, indeed, a number of notable players now working in the classroom. The Department of Education should consider using this valuable resource in a formal way.
Na Píobairí Uilleann has already initiated a process to review how we teach the uilleann pipes and examine the possibility of achieving formal recognition for this tuition. The impact and the response to this development will be interesting to measure over the coming years.
- Traditional Music in a Music Education Movement
Dr Evelyn Grant, Chair, Forum for Music in Ireland/Fóram don Cheol in Éirinn, writes:
Your editorial in the May-June issue outlines ‘two movements’ in music education in Ireland. You refer to the Forum for Music in Ireland and Music Network as being supporters of one of the movements – which is targeted at the Department of Education.
You designate Irish traditional music as the second of the ‘two movements’, with various sectors within traditional music working independently and drawing on funding from a variety of sources including the Arts Council and the Department of the Gaeltacht.
While the editorial raises the important issue of the need for a concerted effort by a critical mass to influence the development of a national strategy for music education in this country, it misunderstands both the ethos of the Forum for Music in Ireland and the model for music provision proposed in the Music Network Feasibility study on the provision of local music services.
The Forum for Music in Ireland, founded in 1999, is the first umbrella-body to bring together people from all types of music and to highlight the issues common to the different sectors. Since its inception, it has promoted a greater understanding and respect across the different genres of music. There is no doubt that, historically, there has been a big divide between different musical ‘camps’ – with supporters of each ‘camp’ closely guarding its own territory – be it classical, traditional, popular or jazz. This has changed dramatically in recent years, not just in Ireland but internationally. The way in which musicians are embracing different genres is reflected in changes in music education at all levels. Certainly, each musical form has its own particular identity and set of concerns for its preservation and development, but the Forum for Music in Ireland has moved forward on common concerns such as access; opportunity; standards; professional development and training, among others. But, perhaps the Forum’s greatest achievement has been the promotion of respect between musical genres.
In the absence of political will to improve provision of services in music education – of whatever genre – committed people find their own way through the political system to source funding. Increasingly, funding is sought through the social cohesion/access local government/tourism routes – through the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht affairs; through local authorities, and so on. The ‘elephant in the corner’ is, of course, the Department of Education, which has consistently refused to address the most basic issue of equality of access to music education, by failing to provide a coherent national system.
Perhaps the purpose of your editorial was to throw down the gauntlet to the traditional music sector not to ‘undersell’ itself and to be more concerted in its efforts. You are certainly correct in suggesting that all who are interested in music education should ‘join forces’. However, that is precisely what the Forum for Music in Ireland is about – it is a Forum embracing all genres of music and tackling all issues affecting music in this country.
On behalf of the Forum, I reject the notion of their being ‘two movements’ and invite people to create the critical mass needed to effect change by becoming involved in the work of the Forum. Visit www.forumformusic.ie
- John Adams and Accessible Music
Dave Flynn, Spiddal, Co. Galway, writes:
In his ‘New Work Notes’ column, John McLachlan has criticised music which he deems ‘simplistic’ or ‘accessible’. In his most recent article he reverts to Adorno-like extremes by stating: ‘Those who have turned towards writing more accessible music are just pessimists for the future, and those who continue on the recondite road are optimists’.
This kind of aesthetic is long since redundant. Indeed one piece of music which symbolises the dismantling of this aesthetic in the latter twentieth century is Harmonielehre, John Adams’ orchestral masterpiece which McLachlan singles out while attempting to dismiss Adams’ importance. Harmonielehre is one of the most significant orchestral works of the late twentieth century to many, and far from being a piece ‘with no Adams’, it is in fact the work which defines his 1980s output.
McLachlan seems so inclined towards the redundant Adorno aesthetic he fails to appreciate that Harmonielehre is a glorious slap in the face to those who ridiculously took Schoenberg’s ideas to their extreme. By taking the title from Schoenberg himself and mixing late-Romantic style orchestration with the newly influential minimalism, Adams bravely went against the composition trends of the time. At some of its first performances Harmonielehre created scenes of Rite of Spring proportions with the modernists and minimalists ironically uniting in outrage at Adams for daring to link one school with the other. If Schoenberg emancipated the dissonance then Adams emancipated the consonance and in doing so helped create the healthy state of affairs composers enjoy today where it is equally valid to compose atonally or tonally. However, it would appear from reading McLachlan’s writings in the JMI that this is not the case in Ireland.
Michael McGlynn asked readers in 2001, ‘…whether Irish composers would rather be part of an exclusive or inclusive group of musical creators, and if inclusive, how we could go about unifying ourselves into a single, positive force?’
Unfortunately, it would seem that McGlynn’s plea has fallen on deaf ears because since then McLachlan and others have been criticising ‘accessible’ new music in their divisive articles, despite the fact that Schoenberg, the man who these writers view as such an icon, once said ‘there is still great music to be written in C major’. It is the failure of people like Adorno to recognise this fact that led to unjust criticism of innovative ‘accessible’ composers like Sibelius and Holst. The same is now happening to Adams and others.
I would argue that Sibelius, Holst, Adams et al have done exactly as Raymond Deane once suggested in JMI: ‘Ultimately I consider that the highest responsibility composers bear towards the public is the same one that they owe to themselves – to compose the best possible music that is within their power.’
The fact that they have composed more ‘accessible’ music than Schoenberg, Boulez et al does not make them any less innovative or valid.
- Musical Texts of the Elite
Professor Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University, Canada, writes:
First, my thanks for including a review of my Music, Postcolonialism and Gender in the May/June issue of JMI. It isn’t often that an academic book featuring eighteenth-century texts gets any press at all beyond academic journals on eighteenth-century texts. JMI is to be commended for taking seriously its mandate to bring together ‘new writing and ideas on traditional, classical, contemporary and improvised music in Ireland’ from a variety of venues. I also appreciate the opportunity to respond to Barra Ó Séaghdha’s review of my book.
There is indeed a case to be made for a book that attends to music of ‘the thousands of musicians [who] continued to sing and play the music’ outside of ‘drawing-rooms and coffee-houses.’ Niall Ó Ciosáin’s comments on the difficulties of documenting the ‘local and popular cultures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland’ also apply to the musical sphere: ‘The words and beliefs of the majority are rarely, if ever, available in forms which are not heavily mediated’ (Print and Popular Culture in Ireland, 1750–1850, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, p. 1). For its part, Music, Postcolonialism and Gender sets out to examine ‘texts concerning Irish music’ [my emphasis] printed during the eighteenth and nineteenth century that contributed to the representation of Irish national identity at home and abroad. By its nature, then, it focuses heavily on ‘products of Anglophone, educated society,’ as Barra Ó Séaghdha observes, as these are the products that, for the most part, were made available in print. However, the book examines these products in attempt not to reassert the hegemony of that Anglophone society, but to indicate the way in which native Irish music has worked to destabilise the power/knowledge conjunction that historically has placed native Irish inhabitants at the bottom of a political and cultural hierarchy – with often brutal consequences.
As far back as 1188, Giraldus Cambrensis’ Topography of Ireland reflects the ways in which native Irish music troubled the binary of colonised/coloniser, suggesting that this relationship was undermined even as it was being established. While Giraldus presented a disparaging account of native Irish life, he waxed eloquent about the ‘perfection’ and strange power of the music of Irish harpers: it is ‘unequal in its equality, discordant in its concord, most noticeably perfect when its perfection is concealed.’ Giraldus’ comments on native Irish music were used extensively during the eighteenth century by both Catholic and Protestant commentators, as they were read from the perspective of a developing hierarchy of the arts that accorded music the most mystical properties of all the fine arts. Music, in the words of the Irish Protestant-turned-Catholic philosopher James Usher, is ‘too confused and fluid to be collected into a distinct idea.’ It is in such a context, I suggest, that the discourse on Irish music – and please note this is ‘discourse’, not practice – gained much of its currency within the literate population. My book considers how the ‘fluidity’ and ambivalence attributed to Irish music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made it a particularly compelling means through which a number of writers could address the terms of colonial power – and its mirror opposite, nationalism. This was the book’s purview, not to write a complete history of Irish music or ‘a comparison of Ireland with Germany, Denmark, England and other countries.’
Music, Postcolonialism and Gender also traces the way in which the terms of colonial and national power were represented in a gendered context. To correct a point made by your reviewer, it is not music itself that is ‘always potentially undermining assertive masculinity’ but the particular contexts in which that music is presented by both male and female figures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that reflects gendered practices and ideologies that in turn contribute to the construction of a gendered image of the nation. In the case of an 1840 edition of The Ancient Music of Ireland, for example, Edward Bunting converted tunes played orally by mostly male harpers (there was one woman) at the Belfast Harp Festival (1792) into printed pianoforte music, re-presenting it in the context of nineteenth-century drawing-room culture in which women were the principle players of the piano. To give another example, the political impact of Thomas Moore’s songs, which in their original form with music and images, were remarkably radical, was compromised by the fact that the songs were presented as poems at a time when poetry itself was undergoing a gendered reappraisal and by the fact that Moore himself was represented as a frivolous and feminine figure, despite the more serious productions of his later years – works such as Memoirs of the Life of Sheridan (1825); Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life (1830); The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831). Moore, said the National Review (July, 1856), was ‘manly in the sense of being high-spirited, but he wanted something of the breadth of manhood.’ Such a comment reinforced an image of the Irish nation as unmasculine in the minds of English readers, Moore being still identified so strongly with Ireland at that time.
Barra Ó Séaghdha’s point about the phrase ‘Irish music’ is an excellent one that I struggled with in writing the book. ‘Irish music’ is the compromise I came up with, acknowledging that native Irish music was itself ‘an amalgam of many streams of native and European influence’ (Brian Boydell, ‘Music before 1700,’ in A New History of Ireland, vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1691–1800, ed. T. W. Moody and W. E. Vaughan, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, p. 546), that there was indeed music in Ireland that was not ‘Irish’ per se (Harry White has written eloquently on this in The Keeper’s Recital, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998) and that the term ‘native Irish music’ doesn’t really describe some printed collections of tunes that have little connection with the practice of native Irish players. I’m sure it’s an issue that, along with many others, will continue to be discussed as more scholars and writers join the discussion.
- John Adams at the RTÉ Living Music Festival
Ronan Guifoyle, Artistic Director of the 2007 RTÉ Living Music Festival, writes:
I would like to respond to a couple of points about the RTÉ LMF made in the last issue of the JMI. First off, with regard to Barra Ó Séaghdha’s review I must say I found it to be fair in tone, in the sense that the reader could clearly see that the views he was expressing were his own, rather than those opinions being presented, as is so often the case by critics (especially classical music critics), as unarguable facts. While accepting the tone of his opinions as being fair, I found the review as a whole to be (something he accused the festival of) lacking focus, and must disagree with several points he made and feel the need to clarify a couple of others.
Apart from celebrating the music of John Adams, one of the other things I wanted to achieve in programming this festival was to present audiences (both classical and jazz) with music which I believe both complemented that Adams theme and also which they might not hear in their normal concert-going activities. In speaking about the programming Mr Ó Séaghdha writes: ‘This may have been an impressive demonstration of pluralism, but it meant that the event could also be seen as lacking focus. The classical equivalent might be to program Schubert, Grieg, Dusapin, Ian Wilson and Siobhan Cleary.’
While I can see where Mr Ó Séaghdha is coming from in this, his suggestion of the festival lacking focus, and his contention as to why that was, completely breaks down because his analogy doesn’t hold up to even the most cursory scrutiny by anyone with a good knowledge of jazz history and development. In describing the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra as ‘old fashioned’ he falls into the fundamental error of equating instrumentation with style. The SJO uses the same basic instrumentation as Duke Ellington’s orchestra, but this does not automatically make the music of the two groups the same. This is like saying that, because Adams uses roughly the same instrumental forces in some of his orchestral works as many nineteenth-century composers, you can automatically describe these pieces as being ‘nineteenth-century’ in style.
I’m assuming that Mr Ó Séaghdha is speaking about McNeely and the SJO when he mentions Schubert as being a possible classical equivalent, but, if we’re going to go down the road of jazz and classical historical equivalents, then Ellington or even Claude Thornhill and Don Redman would be much more appropriate to compare to Schubert than Jim McNeely, whose harmonic and structural language would be unrecognizable to composers of the jazz ‘Schubertian’ era! His further contention that people who were interested in the SJO would be not be interested in Tim Berne also breaks down, again because of what I believe is a lack of knowledge of jazz history and contemporary practice. To further develop his theme by comparing the music of Ian Wilson and Siobhán Cleary to that of White Rocket (whom he admits he didn’t hear), presumably on the grounds that all three are Irish, only further demonstrates the futility and inaccuracy of this analogy.
But I suppose I can’t complain about getting this kind of reaction in the sense that I did want the music of the festival to sometimes challenge the assumptions and experiences of the audience – the fact that it did the same thing to some of the critics is no bad thing!
In relation to my contribution to the open discussion at the Sugar Club, Mr Ó Séaghdha states: ‘His belief that jazz is especially valuable because it is such a “nice human thing to do” to get on stage and “discuss” something did not do enough to identify the specific nature of jazz; it would also encounter vigorous objection from the classical and traditional sectors, to name but two.’ And this: ‘His belief that jazz is about process rather than result also needs clarification and qualification, given that the history of jazz has coincided with the history of recording technology and that recordings are prized and listened to repeatedly as in other idioms.’
In relation to the first point, let me clarify what I meant by this. By describing the jazz practice of the musical discussion of a subject as being ‘human’, I did not mean to imply that it makes other musical genres inhuman! Of course musical subjects are ‘discussed’ in all musical genres, but in jazz the method of doing this is unique in that the discussion is improvised by the entire group. My description of this as being a particularly ‘human’ thing to do is a reference to the fact that this is how we live our lives – by improvising. Every day thousands of small (and sometimes large) details of our lives are improvised – what time we get up at, in which order we arrange our day, or even a meal: do you put the toast on the plate or eat it in your hand? Do you put your coat on before you go out, or is the weather nice enough to do without it? All of these kinds of things are improvised on the spot by every human being on the planet. In improvising our lives we make decisions on a minute by minute (or even second by second) basis. A jazz group does exactly that with music – decisions are made on the spot, based on the way the discussion with the other group members is going. As in the rest of our lives, sometimes those decisions are good ones and sometimes they’re not! Of course, the more experienced the musicians are, the more likely they are to make good decisions, again just like real life. This is what I meant by the humanity of jazz – in many ways it mirrors daily life.
With regard to my second contention that jazz is about process rather than result, I think the argument regarding recordings is a red herring. Yes, recordings are prized in jazz just as they are in other musics, but what the recordings represent is different. A jazz recording is really more akin to a photograph than it is to a pop or classical recording. In both pop and classical music all the details are worked out in advance by the composers and producers, and the recordings are based on the results of these decisions. If you own a recording of a Beethoven Symphony or a U2 album, and then go and hear the music live, it is very unlikely that the music will differ widely from the recorded interpretation, since the recording is an aural capture of the result of a process – composition.
In jazz the recording is of the process itself – the musicians are captured in improvised performance, they will never play these notes in this order ever again – there is no ‘result’. It is like photographing an event, the moment is captured, frozen, but the action it captures is not static; it goes on and is never the same again. What you hold in your hands is a souvenir of a never-to-be-repeated event, not the culmination of a process that is capable of being repeated over and over again.
For example, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue is the biggest selling jazz recording of all time, yet the music it captured was recorded in the studio in six hours by a band that never performed together again. What the recording represents is a ‘photograph’ of what happened in that studio on that day with those people, a mechanical capturing of a real-time process. The musicians themselves would have been incapable (should they have wanted to) of ever again reproducing those notes so beloved by millions of people. Those millions of people (including myself) own a recording that is a document of the act of group improvisation that took place in those hours – a document of a process in action, not a documentation of a result.
Finally, both Barra Ó Séaghdha in his review, and John McLachlan in his column in the same issue, damn John Adams with faint praise. Since Adams is the most performed living American composer with a vast amount of future performances listed on Boosey and Hawkes’ website over the next several years, whose music is championed by the likes of the Kronos Quartet, Gidon Kremer, Michael Tilson Thomas, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the London Sinfonietta and Emmanuel Ax, and whose music is performed by the world’s greatest orchestras and performing groups, he hardly needs defending from such disapproval by the likes of me. But, as someone who is a great admirer of Adams’ work and who had the good fortune to spend a lot of time with his music both before and during the festival, I feel compelled to say that I find it extraordinary that Mr Ó Séaghdha could make the following statement: ‘One recurring impression: that this was film music without a film (when musical interest waned it was possible to pass the time by inventing scenarios – here a highway vista, there the schoolteacher emerging from a lonely house on the prairie as a stranger passes…).’
To describe that opinion as being facile is to do it more justice than it deserves. That’s the sort of naïve statement one would expect from a novice to classical concert going, not a serious music critic – the sort of mentality that compares Bartók’s music to being like music from a suspense movie or Rachmaninoff’s music being like a soundtrack to a sentimental romantic film. To compound the facile nature of this statement he goes on to ask this: ‘One question: other than particularly colourful orchestration, what distinguishes Adams’ apparently generous, vernacular use of American folk/popular elements from the shamrockery of which certain Irish composers are accused?’
How about emotional depth, harmonic and rhythmic sophistication, structural brilliance and originality? Comparing cheap overblown orchestral evocations of Irish myths, legends and historical events to Slonimsky’s Earbox or El Dorado!? You only have to read any interview with Adams to realise how deeply engaged he is with all of American music, and how honestly he sees its place in his music and in his life, to realise how much these American vernacular elements are used organically in his music. One final point on the RTÉ LMF review: the Adams piece for two pianos played by the Crash Ensemble was Hallelujah Junction, not Road Movies, which is for violin and piano and was performed by Michael D’arcy and Izumi Kimura at a different concert.
As to John McLachlan’s views on Adams, I can only say that it must be great to have the kind of self confidence in one’s critical faculties to pronounce that one of Adams’ most celebrated and performed pieces has ‘no Adams in it’, or to be able to let us all know when Adams’ has intervened in his own music in order to make it more ‘user-friendly’ (user-friendliness in music apparently being something which McLachlan finds ‘unsettling’). This amounts to an accusation of artistic dishonesty on Adams’ part, stating that he has used commercial considerations as a reason to deliberately change the natural course of his music. Even the most cursory reading of Adams’ thoughts about music, about his own and that of others, would make one see what a misguided accusation this is. As to the further pronouncement that Adams is a composer living in the past and is not as important as Stravinsky, Varése or Berio, well that kind of statement is the sort of futile, composer-geeky parlour game that I would imagine Adams would have little time for, or interest in playing – he’d be too busy writing music that is being performed at the present time and that will be performed in the future.
