Two months ago, after releasing my new album, Songs & Stories,Vol 1, I asked Irish composer Craig Cox to listen and offer his thoughts, without any prompting from me. Craig and I have worked together on several projects since I arrived in Ireland in 2012. His response resonated with me, so I will comment on parts of it here in order to explain my background, and what led me to write these songs.
The music on Alain Servant’s new album is a synthesis of his years of artistic vagrancy.
Vagrancy! This is a word that well summarises my artistic path. I started in theatre as an actor in my early teens and, at the age of sixteen, with eight friends, created a theatre company called ‘Tour de Babel’ (Tower of Babel). This adventure continued for over fifteen years. After moving from the Parisian underground scene to the French countryside, we created more than twenty shows, with the aim of meeting other cultures and using theatre as an intercultural laboratory. We always worked in collaboration with artists from other cultures, simultaneously immersing ourselves in them as we went along.
As an actor, director and musician, I was able to incorporate practices and visions from the Mediterranean world (Lebanon and Tunisia), Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Cuba), Asia (India and China) and Europe. I discovered Indian Classical music and started practicing the sarod
Then the Turkish Oud.
But all adventures must come to an end! The company split up and we all parted on our own paths. I next created a residency space for artists in the countryside in France where all arts and artistic movements were welcome to create and experiment. Over a period of ten years, I met and practiced with clowns, jugglers, acrobats, theatre makers, butoh dancers…
Then, I arrived in Ireland! This island has become for me not only a personal nest but also a place in which to focus my practice.
Alain’s practice is fundamentally one based in narrative: his craft is the construction of worlds that hold up a warped mirror to the familiar, placing the listener inside an ethereal realm in which everything is distorted yet illuminated.
I am a storyteller. I am also an actor, writer and musician. In Ireland, I found that songwriting was a way of merging my practices. My head is filled with myths and stories, and I found in Ireland a fertile land for my imagination to blossom.
The dark earth and the cold sea have allowed the seeds of strange plants that I have carried all my life to take root in a peaceful garden, the poisonous and the medicinal growing side by side.
I sit now in this garden, picking these fruits and becoming intoxicated with their smells and the memories they recall in me. I am present in the here and now, but many dimensions overlap. And I sing my perceptions as they arise.
An appropriate adjective for this album is “multi-lingual”. Not simply in reference to the actual shifts between European tongues (so that the inherent musicality of language is demonstrated, it becoming a texture in itself), but also in reference to the musical world.
I have no real mother tongue. I spent my early childhood in Bolivia, speaking Spanish and listening the indigenous people speaking Quechua and Aymara. Arriving in France in Marseille, I learned French with a strong southern accent, then moved to Paris and, although fascinated by Classical French literature and poetry, I spent most of my time hanging around with the kids of my quartier learning argot, the Parisian slang that was very much alive at the time. And then English came for me, a language that seems to fit the songs I sing.
A language is a way of seeing the world, as well as its music, different frequencies that don’t strike the soul’s strings in the same way. It is not necessarily the language that drives me, but rather the language revealing itself through whatever the subject is. A rock in a high mountain sings in Spanish, and a tree by a gentle river in French. What language would a bottle of whiskey lying in the gutter speak? I am this rock, this tree and this bottle of whiskey!
Moving through this album is like rolling through the shifting narrative structure of a dream, each track morphing into the next so that an overall tone manifests and an internal metaphorical logic constructed, with references to flowers, flowing water and undeath mushrooming and acting as way points that trick the listener’s memory while revealing the underlying subtext of an almost squalid hopefulness: a unique wisdom that weaves piss and vinegar parables, speaking reassurances in hoarse tones.
For me, any creative act is a journey into the subconscious world. I jump into unknown depths and come back laughing, clutching some new treasures that become songs or something else. In these depths, I meet gods, kings and queens, slaves, even children playing with wild animals…
Any new creation is a cathartic process that brings me back to a world of wonder. The logic emerges by itself with no conscious will. I try to follow the natural movement of expansion and contraction. And it can be hard work! As hard as the craft of the blacksmith at times. Because art is a craft, and demands skills, experience and practice.
I would like to conclude with a word on collaboration. Collaboration is essential for me. The creative process at times can be solitary, but becomes useless if there’s no transformation through exchange.
I was lucky in Ireland to encounter John Linnane, one of the best musicians and performers I have ever met.
Since 2017, we have worked together and performed together and I would like to thank him, not only because he’s a great artist, but also because he’s a great human being. It is an honour to have him beside me in this adventure.
For a number of years now, I’ve been convinced (too fervently, in the opinion of some of my friends!) that Lana Del Rey ranks among America’s most challenging and skillful of contemporary wordsmiths: a singer-poet with a unique (and often unsettling) talent for cultural imagining.
Stylish, intelligent, irreverent, and vulnerable, her music packs a poetic punch, while also drawing on traditions of literature, film, and popular song, ranging from Bruce Springsteen’s glimmering highways of folk-rock to the Beat generation’s boundary-breaking visions of an embodied (and renewed) American spirit.
What “I really got from [Allen] Ginsberg was that you can tell a story [by] painting pictures with words”, Del Rey has said of her early song-writing practice: “It just became my passion immediately, playing with words and poetry”, as a means of personal self-definition. The result has been a body of literary-musical work at once socially subversive and emotionally profound.
If Arthur Penn could envisage Bonnie and Clyde as icons of a generalised counter-cultural romance in the mid-sixties, painting the seductions of sexual liberation against a lavish panorama of eruptive killing, Del Rey’s albums adopt the motifs and then test the limits of that project (and projection), weaving the visceral mythologies of youthful passion and big dreams into a tapestry, scorched and frayed at the edges, of insidious and often compulsive “ultraviolence”. “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”, simmers her song of that name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbT30a7U0Cs
And lest we mistake such provocations for a merely personal fetish, we’re reminded of America’s own deep-running attachment to such obsessive fantasies. “Blessed is this union”, Del Rey lilts: “I’m your jazz singer, / And you’re my cult leader, / I’ll love you forever.” On “the dark side / of the American dream”, harm can seem heavenly, and the visions of art become entangled, intimately, with the realities of pain: Ultraviolence.
Some critics have objected to this album, interpreting it (and her work more broadly) as a glorification of domestic and patriarchal abuse. Others have accused Del Rey herself of misogyny, infantilising her female personae and reinforcing an already pernicious culture of male intimidation and exploitation against women. For all their persistence, however, these critiques frequently misread (or miss entirely) the complexity of cultural portraiture that Del Rey is attempting.
Del Rey’s back catalogue stands as a tour-de-force in self-invention, but also offers a subtle (and disturbing) diagnosis of the society she claims, always, as her own – “like an American.” “Elvis is my Daddy, Marilyn my Mother”, she says, in an artistic gestalt both parodic in its appropriations and compelling, in its assurance: “Jesus is my bestest friend.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hCX86y8a9w
In the USA, that most image-saturated and fame-hungry of republics, Del Rey is a symbol striving to become a myth – in which we see ourselves in a new light, dreamily nightmared. “Every time I close my eyes”, she sings (partly in tribute to F. Scott Fitzgerald), “It’s like a dark paradise.” To condemn Lana Del Rey, the singer posits, would be akin to renouncing America itself, love it or loathe it.
Del Rey, of course, famously featured on the score of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, crooning a two-dimensional, Daisy-esque plea to be loved forever “like a little child.” In its complicated glamour and wounded awareness of the pitfalls and attractions of “burning at both ends”, however, her work may be seen to inherit and examine (with an equal intensity) those same concerns dramatised by Fitzgerald, not to mention Enda St Vincent Millay, the originator of that smoky apothegm:
My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light!
There has always been more of Gatsby (whose most usual reiteration has resembled Don Draper in Mad Men) than Daisy in Del Rey’s song of herself, despite what her detractors may suggest. Like her, Fitzgerald’s titular everyman is, fundamentally, nobody special, who created the name, wealth, identity, and charisma he is mythically remembered for: something from nothing, and in his case, all for a long-gone lover, out of the past. Lana Del Rey likewise is a carefully curated, highly stylised, all-encompassing fiction (invented by Elizabeth Grant) – a romance, but one at the same time more palpably real than pop music, her chosen genre, can traditionally contain.
There’s a comparable sophistication of psychological portraiture in the work of both figures. The triumph of Fitzgerald’s late masterpiece, Tender is the Night, is not the protracted revelation of Dick Diver’s inner life and escalating crisis, which so fills the novel, but the later, briefer revelation of Nicole’s astute ability to see and dissect the manipulations and (self-)deceptions of her magnetic husband for what they are. Unbeknownst to him, she notes
[how] something was developing behind [his] silence, behind the hard, blue eyes […] it was as though an incalculable story was telling itself inside him, about which she could only guess at in the moments when it broke through the surface. [She saw now that] his eyes focussed upon her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and drew her near.
Del Rey’s music shines with similar moments of life-altering clarity, seeing in the heroic other she once loved the havoc of destructions he, or their relationship, has become. “But I can’t fix him, can’t make him better, / I can’t do nothing about / His strange weather”. Her songs are dramas of mutual recognition and breakdown, of shared compulsions and irrevocable severance, or what Robert Lowell called (in his own poetry) Life Studies.
It is typical of Del Rey, moreover, that she can cite – too blithely, in the view of some critics – both Sylvia Plath (in “Hope is a dangerous thing…”) and Billie Holiday (in “The Blackest Day”) as inspirations for her own work, which also includes a cover of a track made famous by Nina Simone, “The Other Woman”. “I contain multitudes”, she has said, quoting Walt Whitman – and it is perhaps this audacious hybridity that generates the aura of authentic originality that surrounds her work.
Whitman himself is a resplendent ghost, looming at the margins of Del Rey’s amatory vision. “I Sing the Body Electric” is a direct quotation from his poetry, while “Music to Watch Boys To” might be taken as a riff on that section of “Song of Myself” in which a woman (a stand-in for the author) experiences a sensation of powerful erotic arousal when watching “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore”.
Walt Whitman.
Del Rey’s song, similarly, is suffused with sexual desire – albeit prefaced by the vital, and conscious, assertion, “I know what only the girls know” (emphasis mine).
The same recognition, both vulnerable and electrifying, deepens what would otherwise be the merely referential adaptations from Leonard Cohen elsewhere in her repertoire: when she embraces his (male) mantra as her own, “I’m your man”, and in offering her own haunted rendition of “Chelsea Hotel, No. 2” (which recalls a now-estranged lover “giving me head / on the unmade bed”). Far from perpetuating the presumptions of “the male gaze”, or solidifying its social perceptions, Del Rey subverts its power, wielding it for her personal self-expression (as one of “the girls”).
Relatedly, the blend of ecstatic remembrance and heart-sick yearning that pulses through Del Rey’s music has, at times, an explicitly religious (if also somewhat Nietzschean) dimension. “Faith, don’t fail me now”, as one prayerful, foreboding love song has it: even though, as star-split lovers, “we were born to die.” To wander for any length of time among Del Rey’s American monuments is to witness the singer herself repeatedly reaching for and casting off the old idols, in an atmosphere of passionate sexual and self-awakening that might, we’re lead to imagine, suffice where a previous “faith” (or love) has indeed foundered. “God’s dead, / I said: baby, that’s alright with me”, rings one propulsive credo. “When I’m down on my knees, you’re how I pray”, eddies another. And for the huddled, nameless voyeurs, her listeners (whose apparently insatiable “groupie love” hovers as a backdrop to all her songs), Del Rey reserves a glancing blue note: “Walk in the way of my sweet resurrection”.
As here, for all her sardonic self-awareness, Del Rey seems to claim De Profundis as an unspoken motto for her music: a cry “out of the depths”. When her shadowy voice rises – in a sudden, sky-coloured lift – with the plea and invocation, “Let there be light”, we believe not only in the force of her desire but in the power of song itself, to utter our truths.
Lana del Ray in 2014.
Her persona also displays a Wildean flair, a delicious ease, in skewering the prevailing moral codes and injunctions of her society. Del Rey expresses, with a kind of controlled but abundant intensity, what she sees as the psyche of American life, with the result that we can glance if we wish to, in the falling crystal of her music, what political militants have called the system, with its permeating paradoxes and devastations.
Del Rey frequently appears as both prophet and survivor of a Beat-like realm of experience, lived on the edge (or “on that open road”, as she has it), known only to the beautiful and damned. “In the land of Gods and Monsters / I was an angel”, she moons, “wanting to be fucked hard”. In her words, Del Rey is the self-described product – in the full and possibly uneasy sense of that term – of “a freshman generation / Of degenerate beauty queens”:
With our drugs, and our love, And our dreams, and our rage, Blurring the lines Between real and the fake…
Latent cultural pieties concerning (female) sex and celebrity, individuality and personal choice, are deployed and then exploded; whenever Del Rey looks in the mirror, we see all of America in vivid close-up, simultaneously trapped and liberated in a dream-landscape where drifters survive by “living like Jim Morrison”, made “degenerate” and luminous by yearning.
Part of what makes this extravagant concoction so fascinating is the combined subtlety and hellion irreverence with which the singer-songwriter theorises (and questions) the meaning of her own star-power. “Life imitates Art”, she declares, before exploring the full implications of such a behavioural pattern, in songs (like those above) as beguiling in their soundscape as they are troubling in the vistas they evoke – where culturally approved aspirations (towards fame or material self-satisfaction, for instance) can dissolve in bathetic fantasies at once lurid and seductive. “There’s nothing wrong”, she chants, as we find ourselves “contemplating God / Under the chemtrails over the country club.”
This is a music that sets out, with an appropriately expansive sense of cultural ambition, to dismantle and then re-conjure the edifice of American civilization in its own image, soaring to celestial heights of song and emotion, as the hell-fires of contemporary history burn on. “I can see my baby swinging”, Del Rey sings, in sweeping glissando: “His parliament’s on fire, and his hands are up.”
The potentially destructive fevers of young love are likened to, indeed are made to encompass and elucidate, the act and aftermath of a failed rebellion, in an image that also calls to mind the USA’s (literally incendiary) geopolitical relationship with Central and South American nations. Amid the ruins of a vaguely defined but still palpable political cataclysm, the cries of revolution are distilled down to a sultry whisper – for Del Rey, their essence – “I’m in love.” “Real love”, we likewise learn elsewhere, “is like smiling when the firing squad’s against ya, / but you stay lined up.”
And yet, the mythological potency of such images is counteracted by competing narratives, streaming through the work as a whole, of quest and longing, which elaborate, in turn, Del Rey’s self-styled brand of American hope. “I’m still looking for my own version of America,” she sings, drawing on both John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”: “One without the gun, where the flag can freely fly.”
While the atmosphere that most lingers in and around these tracks is of cinematic nostalgia, the intensities of past (or lost) intimacy montageing with the possibility of a redeemed, future love, the tone is in fact remarkably flexible, varying from elegaic to playful. “God Damn Man-child”, is the headline (the opening lyric) of Norman Fucking Rockwell!, a Trump-era album that may be read as a sometimes bemused, often probing investigation into American maleness and its social manifestations. “I watch the guys getting high as they fight / for the things that they hold dear”, Del Rey observes, adding characteristic nuance to the scene: “[as they fight] to forget the things they fear.” “There’s a new revolution”, we hear in another, more unsettling track, attuned to the #MeToo movement and its critique of an entertainment industry dominated by powerful, exploitative, and sexually rapacious men – a culture, in her words, “born of confusion / and quiet collusion / of which mostly I’ve known”:
Cause I’ve got Monsters still under my bed That I could never fight off (A gatekeeper carelessly dropping The keys on my nights off).
Such candid, emotionally complex confessionalism, and with regard to so intimate (and apparently traumatic) an experience of “gatekeeper” culture, arguably problematises critical arguments that cast the singer either as an apologist for patriarchal systems, or “tone-deaf” to the concerns and testimonies of women survivors. If anything, Del Rey has been consistently vivid and challenging in her portrayals of the music business – as well as American life more broadly – and in her capacity both to articulate and critique the promises of “Money, Power, Glory” that fuel it. “I Fucked My Way Up to the Top” can be understood as a deliberately inflammatory declaration of artistic self-fashioning, but also as a retort to a professional media prone to judging and dismissing female artists – an example of an indomitable diva taking ownership of the demeaning stereotypes and derisory language used against her.
“Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have”, Del Rey sings, in almost a whisper, “But I have it.” Her music subverts the preconceptions and prejudices of the narratives (concerning love, femininity, power, and song itself) that underpin Western modernity, even as it translates their key appeals into a new register of cultural emotion.
Listening to Lana, we see America’s most deep-rooted degradations and exultations writ large; but we also learn to view life itself as a lover’s covenant, demanding that we intuit, and then go on to risk, the shining path before us – leading, perhaps, to a more shareable world. “No bombs in the sky (only fireworks, when you and I collide): / It’s just a dream I had in mind.” Long may the dream continue.
I realised that I really like writing through doing this, and that there’s plenty more to write, but for now here are a few aspects I’d like to share with you.
Vision
Something I’ve learned, beyond a doubt is how essential it is for any musician, artist or human being to cultivate a vision for yourself. Have an inner vision and find ways to develop it. It’s for you alone and gives you confidence and uniqueness. Working on craft matters too. But for me, vision comes first and is fundamental. It’s what inspires the consistent work. It animates practise, creativity, relationships, and brings wellness in ways that are hard to see except when it is absent.
Influences
I grew up in the rural coastal Donegal community of Clooney, one of the most beautiful places in the world. Our horizons growing up were both small and vast. From the top of our hill you look out over the Atlantic, with Iniskeel, Arainn mhór and Roaninish islands, the incredible Gaoth Beara river estuary, Cashelgoland and Narin strand; the magical Bluestacks, the south Donegal mountains sometimes called the Sliabh Aduaidh range, and a huge blanket bog that stretches from our house to Donegal town.
In terms of the wider world and a vision of that, our doorway was TV. But we lived in a bubble really. It was honestly an amazing upbringing. Our parents gave us a lot of trust and freedom to wander and explore. There was a hazel wood beside our house and we were the only people that were ever in in it, apart from our neighbour farmer when he was looking for cattle.
At the bottom of our lane is an old and vibrant oak bush growing out of the centre of a boulder.
It’s a well-known local landmark especially with elderly people who said it was a parting stone for emigrants when they were leaving their families. There were fairy bushes, deer, seals, wild geese and winter swans, enchanted and haunted places, and really funny local characters.
Our school had forty kids and two teachers. I tell stories to my friends about growing up, and, as the decades go by, I realise there’s a great book in it.
This upbringing and environment is probably my biggest musical influence. Many other forms and shapes of music and experience have also influenced me but something in this is fundamental. When I’m daydreaming or even just dreaming, it’s this landscape: hazel woods, the hill, the mountains, the sea, the bog, the beach and the lake: this is my dreaming.
Going Home, from my first album Convergence:
The next greatest influence on me is the people and musicians I’ve had the joy of developing relationships and spending time with. But that’s for another time.
As a teen, the bubble opened, and the wider world started to show me what else was there. I liked hip hop and loved metal and electronic music. Then I left the bubble. Moving to Dublin, I quickly realised how much I love music. No Internet in those days, so magazines, record shops, word-of-mouth and hanging out with people were the main ways of finding out about new music and interesting things.
And so, around this time the djembe came along.
My percussion group RITHIM:
Djembe
My beloved djembe, an ancient instrument that’s young in Ireland. Learning to play the djembe has taught me how to play music in a way that I could never otherwise have experienced. Djembe music, constructed in parts and played for hours, is really ingenious.
Hand-drumming gave me a spiritual body experience that I loved. I wanted to learn how to have that experience all the time. It took me to places and to people I couldn’t have imagined meeting. I trained mainly in and around West African drumming for twenty-five years, learning what I could.
My vision throughout was and still is to harness the drum’s energy, power and beauty as an artist, to make my own music and collaborate with others. Being Irish and having many worlds of inspiration, I was always going to do my own thing.
A piece entitled Macaomh Mór inspired from the Irish folktale Young Conall of Howth:
Envisioning
I practice meditation. In this, everything in our awareness – thoughts, emotions, physical sensation – is observed from a place of stillness. This place of stillness and peace is always available. In this moment your vision emerges and develops. It is here where the freshness and originality is.
It can inform on a micro level like with a musical idea, an arrangement, a video or a difficult conversation. It can be on a macro level with longer range aspects: albums, career moves, relationships. The crazy human world typically doesn’t support a process involving stillness so it can be easy to forget about it. But hey, don’t.
One thing I can say for sure is that it always works for me and it’s life-changing.
In a non-stop changing world it shows me that one thing doesn’t change. My essence, your essence, is always the same.
The vision that emerges is completely unique to you. I say you can trust it, it’s yours, and enjoy it.
Treelan: The Long Walk:
Éamonn Cagney is currently working on his second solo album, teaches percussion in The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at University of Limerick, and is about to release a collaboration album with Congolese guitar maestro Niwel Tsumbu.
When a respected and much-loved member of the Irish jazz scene suffered a major illness, the jazz community rallied round to support him in the best way they know – a gala fundraising concert, streaming to audiences all over the globe this Sunday.
Phil Ware is one of the Irish jazz’s most celebrated musicians, a much-respected pianist and an inspirational teacher, who led his own trio to national and international acclaim, as well as playing with some of Ireland’s – and the world’s – leading jazz musicians, including Louis Stewart, Peter Bernstein, Perico Sambeat, Bobby Wellins, Honor Heffernan and Ian Shaw.
In June 2020, Phil suffered a rare form of stroke – which left him severely disabled, unable to speak or to move the right side of his body. In that moment, Phil’s life was changed forever. Following surgery at Beaumont Hospital, and weeks of specialist care at the Mater Hospital, Phil was transferred to the Royal Hospital, Donnybrook to begin a long journey of rehabilitation and recovery.
Image: Dorota Konczewska
Over the last year, Phil has made remarkable progress, thanks to the great professional care he has received from doctors, nurses, therapists and support workers in the Irish healthcare system. He has also been supported by many of his friends and colleagues in music who have united in solidarity and friendship at this most challenging time.
Phil’s speech is slowly returning and he has regained some movement in his right side, and while it is still unlikely that he will ever regain his former abilities as a performer, his doctors are hopeful that with the right kind of treatment and rehabilitation, he may make further gains in the coming months and years.
To help Phil recover and to support his needs into the future, a group of his closest friends, led by renowned vocalist Honor Heffernan and Phil’s half-sister Alison Cooke, established The Phil Ware Trust so that those who wanted to support Phil’s recovery could donate to an official, properly governed fund, which has created an extraordinary response.
As part of this fundraising effort, a group of Phil’s former students, came together to raise money in a very fitting way – a benefit concert, featuring many musicians who have been influenced and inspired by Phil. As a teacher in Dublin City University’s jazz programme, Phil inspired many young musicians, and is noted as the teacher who never accepts anything less than the best, but always believes in his students to create the best.
Three organisations in the jazz community came together to bring the concert to life – Improvised Music Company, Jazz Ireland, and the Dublin Jazz Co-op, with the support of Rock Jam. With the ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, the event was planned as a virtual one, with a line-up of some of Dublin’s finest musicians streaming a swinging afternoon of Sunday jazz, presented by DJ and jazz aficionado Billy Ó Hanluain. Fortunately, this also means that it will be accessible to audiences wherever they are in the world.
For the musicians who Phil mentored and inspired, the obvious way to support him is of course to make music and share it with audiences. All of the time and costs of the event are being donated freely by the musicians and organisations involved, so that audiences can enjoy a day of wonderful music while knowing that their money is going to support this extremely important cause.
Special guest for the day is renowned singer Mary Coughlan, who will bring tinges of blues, and folk to the proceedings, hitting audiences across many genres with the extraordinary emotional depth of her voice. Ireland’s jazz scene shows a rich range of influences, and while many of these musicians have come through similar paths in education, their approaches can show very different styles. The younger musicians in the line-up, including many of Phil’s former students, make music that smoothly crosses many boundaries.
Rising singer-songwriter Jennifer McMahon’s raw lyrics are the keystone of her work, while Dublin trio Berri take adventurous improvisatory explorations into jazz standards. The sweet voice of Emilie Conway lends itself to the poetic style of her literary-influenced work, while Ríona Sally Hartman weaves surrealist stories into her lush harmonies. For those with eclectic tastes, Matthias Winkler’s quartet ÄTSCH bring post-rock influences in the vein of Sigur Rós to jazz improvisation, and vocalist Aleka pulls inspiration from her home country of Romania and her classical background to explore jazz standards.
Aside from their performances, many Irish musicians continued to donate their work to the fundraising effort. On the Fund for Phil website, you can find digital albums and an array of music lessons, all donated by the community with full proceeds going to the Fund for Phil.
All monies donated to this benefit concert, officially sanctioned by the trust, will go exclusively to cover costs associated with Phil’s medical care and ongoing rehabilitation, as determined by the board of trustees, which includes distinguished figures from the worlds of medicine, finance and music in Ireland.
The Swing into Summer Sunday Jazz Gala takes place this Sunday 11th July from 3pm-7pm (yes, you can still catch the Euros, don’t worry).
Janet is pregnant and alone. Her boyfriend is god knows where and her dad is having none of it and wants to marry her off to a man of his choosing. She’s having none of that, and wants an abortion. And she’s damned if any man will tell her what to do. It is any time between the eleventh and the sixteenth century, in Scotland.
Frankie Baker loved her boyfriend Allen Britt but she shot him anyway. Her gun was a .38 pistol, and when the time came, her aim was true. By the time Allen died, slowly and painfully in hospital days later, from a single shot wound to his stomach, a ballad about the event was already selling on street corners. It told a story in notes that swung, capturing the imagination of generations. It just wasn’t her story.
A .38 pistol. In ‘murder’ ballad ‘Frankie and Johnny’, the real-life perpetrator of the shooting, Frankie Baker, was unhappy with how she was represented. Among other things was the gun detail. ‘It wasn’t a .44,’ she said, ‘it was just a little old Harrington & Richardson .38. And it couldn’t have gone roota-toot-toot, ’cause I only shot once.’ My new song ‘Don’t Do Me Wrong’ sets the record straight on the events of that fateful night in 1899.
The old woman who lived in the woods killed a baby. We don’t know why she was left holding it, just that she was. Her chorus is a keening wail, a weile-weile-waile that rises from the depths of the well. It is so transcendent, so collective, that others can carry out its ancient, visceral work. Locate the cry in Famine times and its echoes might offer a clue to the circumstances that gave to it.
Lily goes to war to be with her lover, which means pretending she’s a man. Into the bargain she saves his life. She gets to be a soldier and a heroine of the battlefield. You have to hand it to her. But I’m not completely convinced she set out on her heroine journey just to be with her guy. Perhaps she believed in the cause. Perhaps she was just deathly bored with her lot and craved some action.
Polly Amorous
Polly was savagely murdered while pregnant, by her boyfriend, who threw her body in a hole in the ground he’d chillingly spent the night before digging. She had it coming, he saw how other men looked at her – how would he ever truly possess such a woman? He goes off to sail the seas, but her ghost is furious and manifests on his ship, in her arms a revenant child. And he will not resist her beauty now, of this she makes sure, as she lures him to his death among the waves using the temptress charms of his projection.
These were some of the voices that called out to me, as I set about exploring women’s experience in the folk music canon two years ago, voices that were captured at a moment in time, that shape-shifted according to its passage, and that carry with them its cultural and social context. As a singer-songwriter interested in and inspired by women’s perspectives, explored in such songs as ‘Finest Flower’ and ‘Trouble Come Find Me’, I hungered to know them, to explore their possibilities, their hidden aspects, their hearts. Were there new expressions asking to emerge?
Live recording of ‘Trouble Come Find Me’, inspired by the life of pioneering midwife Philomena Canning, with whom Ciara campaigned for justice for five years, until Philomena’s death in 2019:
‘Frankie and Johnny’
It began with ‘Frankie and Johnny’. First written in 1899 in St Louis, Missouri, it was my grandmother’s party piece, the unlikely star of a repertoire that was more readily identified by rousing rebel songs of bold Fenian men, and mournful ballads to Cathleen Ni Houlihan, penned by her beloved uncle, songwriter Peadar Kearney.
But Frankie and Johnny, telling the story of a cheating man and his jealous girlfriend, was the favourite of us kids, with its bold declaration that ‘there ain’t no good in men’, inevitably delivered with finger-pointing gusto by my grandmother Kay Considine. When I later discovered that the ballad was based on real-life events, I wanted to know more.
Through available writings, along with newspaper reports and court documents of the time, I pieced together an alternative tale, which shifted it from a crime of passion into an act of survival, for a young black woman, a sex worker, who was the breadwinner in the relationship and asked in exchange for respect.
The song, created in the direct aftermath of this pivotal event in her life and which dogged her until its end, failed to reflect an important fact, one which led to her acquittal on Friday 13th of October, 1899. (According to Frankie’s testimony, being granted her freedom on this most damned of dates had the welcome bonus of vanquishing her superstitious ‘omens black’.)
As for what happened: Allen had entered Frankie’s bedroom in the small hours of the morning drunk, angry and wielding a knife. She shot in self-defence.
Frankie Baker.
This seemingly small detail blew me away. As I stared at my computer screen into the arresting, disquieting gaze of this queenly young woman – finely dressed, notably composed – I felt deep love for her memory.
Later in life – ground down by events, unable to shake off the story that had been landed upon her, no matter where she went, and powerless over its representation of her (she even tried to sue two movie studios, to no avail) – she would live out her last days in penury, in an asylum.
‘Don’t Do Me Wrong’ is an homage to Frankie Baker and gives life to her perspective of the fateful night in 1899 when her young lover met with an early grave.
Menstruation
As I explored the folk music archives deeper – an uninvited, self-styled confidante of Her – I felt alive and open to nuance, to the spaces between the lines, to that which could not be spoken, and my love for the embattled heroine expanded.
Her blood is lavishly spilled in folk balladry, but there is no mention of menstruation. Her body is readily filled with extra-marital pregnancies that locate her as an outcast, and yet there is no mention of male responsibility.
She is raped and left bereft, and there is no justice. She commits infanticide in extreme desperation, and is cast as a crazed crone. All of women’s struggles through time – the desperate lot of wounded or deprived agency – find expression in our song heritage, and at times I wondered at how deep our keening goes, and if it is indeed as bottomless as a well. Yet her endurance, inner strength and tenacity reminds us that just as a wrecking ball can turn a world to rubble, something new can always be created from the ruins.
The songs of Blood Sex Death platform heroines whose brave, often embattled, lives are offered new expression in unexpected ways, where Gothic tragedy, twisted tenderness and fierceness abound.
A grant from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media as administered via the Music Industry Stimulus Package 2020 enabled me to begin recording this six-song EP of original material inspired by her voice, and once I secure funding to complete them, I look forward to releasing and performing the new material.
Musical Origins
As to how I came to music, perhaps motherhood was the metaphorical wrecking ball out of whose rubble I located my creative desire, and pursued it. In the new world order of an upended life, as two babies slept I fought maternal panic and exhaustion with poor guitar skills, an ear for melody and the strangely solid sensation that came from writing lyrics. Late-night bouts of songwriting alone in the kitchen were, my husband sensed, something urgent and tension-laced, not to be disturbed, even if it meant distance and loneliness for us both.
And he was right. It was only through an imagined creative life being ripped from me as easily as a wet Band-Aid that I knew I’d been sleepwalking. A living heroine, Joni Mitchell, spoke of her grandmother’s descent into madness, and I sensed thwarted creativity in its mix.
Fear can be a great motivator, and the chaos of early motherhood an effective stoker of its flames, especially when you’ve long had a nose for the smoky scent of female madness-terror. It was time to wake up from the dream. There is never a good time to start, so I might as well start now.
Over a decade and two albums on, both independently produced, I can’t say it has been an easy road, but it has been a fascinating and rich one that has led me to places I could not have dreamed of in that kitchen space, late at night, afraid for what I would become if I hadn’t found a means of artistic expression. I’ve gotten to steer a course in music through a career in book publishing, motherhood, and activism, and keep on keeping on, through highs and lows.
My latest project ‘Blood Sex Death’ feels like a coming of age. As I move steadily towards my half-century birthday, some might say it’s about time. For a late developer like me, dabbling in songs hundreds of years in the making, perhaps it is right on course.
I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. And that is poetry. As I needed it. John Cage
‘Nothing to do, nowhere to be?’ This is the space where the best stuff – the best musical stuff – shows its face, ugly, beautiful or otherwise. At first glance, this appears quite simple but when does one actually have nothing to do and nowhere to be?
I could segue in a multitude of directions about the treadmill of living a contemporary life, or the long and deep impact of smart phones on our monkey minds, how instead of liberating us with ever more efficient apps and services they actually fill in any and all space in a day for idleness, daydreaming or any of these seemingly archaic pursuits.
In addition, in this day and age, would I not be crazy to at least tip the hat at any inherent privilege allowing one simply to exist and have nothing to do, nowhere to be, even temporarily?
But this misses what I’m attempting to get at. Anyone who has dabbled in the contemplative arts or meditation may give a knowing nod here. I have found that – and maybe this is the hardest part – I can have ‘nothing to do, nowhere to be’ many times throughout a day even when engaged in doing and going. It involves dropping back and just hearing, listening, feeling, playing; giving oneself the internal space, in the moment, to play and mess and see what happens. Dropping all the to-do lists, the constant planning, the goals, the dreams, the worries, the imagined conversations and arguments with friends and family.
For me, this is where the good stuff lives. Being in this space allows the drama of ideas, feelings, and connections to unfold itself and for the music to flow. With practice and hard work (it may come more easily for others) that space can be attained on a regular basis.
This is one part of my creative process. The internal part. The external part is actually carving out some time in the day when one can make use of the fruits of this space. This also is a challenge, for reasons I’ve discussed and many others.
This part is huge though. I’m sure this phrase has been uttered by many before me but you have to show up for creativity. Show up every day that you can. Show up for minutes or hours and then you will make progress. Show up in the space described above and you can make all sorts of progress. The direction may be unforeseen and not necessarily the progress you think is most pressing, but, there will be progress nonetheless. This is a process, and I address this to myself as much as anyone else.
Just a caveat, however, on occasion works can arrive fully formed in an instant, as if received from some wonderful ‘other’ creative dimension. In this case all one can do is try and document it as soon as possible before it dissipates into the ether once more. When this happens it is truly magical, but it is hard to rely on this source so, to move forward, a process must be developed.
I have been playing the guitar and making music in my own little way since I was eleven years old. Previously, I had wrestled with the piano for a few years, with mixed results. I certainly enjoyed the sounds, getting familiar with melodies and harmony, but at that age I could not relate to the music that I was being taught. It was the height of Grunge so I was deep into Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and also bands like Radiohead. I was also discovering the old guard, The Beatles et al.
Almost immediately after my piano lessons ceased I picked up my father’s old nylon-string guitar and started tinkering with it. My father was a dab hand at a Beatles number and could certainly entertain for an hour or two into the wee hours at a party. He showed me the basic first position chords, plus one jazz number, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ and one Classical piece, ‘Romanza.’ With these great standards of the guitar canon, he set me on my way. The guitar seemed so accessible in comparison to what I had been doing with the piano. My thoughts on this have changed considerably since then but that is another article in itself. Plus there was the notion that I could learn songs that I was listening to. Eleven year old mind well and truly blown!
In addition to all that, and maybe more importantly, the vibrating strings of the guitar seemed to hold a hypnotic power over me. Everything else would fade away and I would be completely zoned in. Whether it was me or someone else playing the instrument. Even very basic chord changes or musical parts would and, I’m happy to say still do, have that effect on me. The sum total of the sounds, the feel, even the look of the fingers dancing on the fretboard, or hands making all sorts of strange, contorted shapes would transfix me, entirely, completely. I was addicted.
I have found that the guitar, or playing music in general, is therapeutic in many ways. As I grew up I would actually process my emotions on the instrument. Some could call it ‘self-soothing’ or something approximating that (as a new father I am really getting to know that term, happy face emoji).
All the mixed up emotions of teenage years (or adult years) could be shaped into some form of tangible sound that I could sit with, more easily, until it had passed through me. A friend recently said to me “music is what emotion sounds like” and I think that I tapped into that early on.
But, let me return to that eleven year old. Very quickly I realised that I was interested in making my own bits of music. Whether an interesting chord change, phrase, melody, finger picking pattern, these little ideas would come out whenever I sat down with the instrument and had some time to breath.
Calling these creations ‘music’ may be a stretch. They were under-developed ideas based more on the arrangement and structure of the instrument than a clear delineation of a musical idea, and even then I struggled to finish a piece. Enjoying a sense of completion still comes hard for me. Beginning can be just as hard, and yes, the bits in-between can be hard too!
What I discussed in the first few paragraphs is the beginning. Giving one the space and time to create and play. The ideas then arrive. The middle part is where the craft comes in. Developing techniques for this is certainly an ongoing process, but generating material from a seedling idea is something that can be honed. With all the music notation software and digital recording platforms available one can take a very basic idea and stretch it, shrink it, chop it up, layer it, reverse it, invert it, amongst other things, and, this is the magic part, hear it back immediately. How did the greats ever do anything before the advent of computers?!
Finishing a piece is another challenge, especially for anyone with any perfectionist tendencies. Letting something go, warts and all, into the world, is an exercise in showing your vulnerabilities. I don’t find this straightforward. It is difficult to put out work when you know the standard that is already available.
Also, knowing that sweet spot when a work is ready to let go of is a dark art in itself. I have only released a tiny percentage of all the music that I have composed. Much of it is forgotten, a lot of it sits in hard drives or old laptops, and some is still is in my head. And that is ok. What remains is an archive of ideas that I can dip into when and how I need them.
Over the years I have prioritised the technicalities of music over the emotional content. I have often been lost in the exhilaration and energy of music, while over-looking subtleties and nuances. I have been self-indulgent and egotistical. However, amidst all this, progress has been made and I have found moments of success on my own terms.
This is a process, and I say this to myself as much as to anyone else.
I’ve never needed a reason to write a song. There have never been any conscious considerations of failure or success during the process. If anything, I can say that what I discover through writing is that there are endless landscapes of discovery. This feeling has not changed in the eleven years I’ve been writing and playing music, but it has definitely been challenged many times by different circumstances, by frustration and impatience.
The first few months of the pandemic were some of the most challenging of times of my life in so many respects, but in particular, to overcome creative blocks of all kinds. I’ve read and heard similar sentiments from artists in all disciplines, from all over the world. Out of necessity I had to find new pathways through the distraction and despair that were surrounding the drive to write.
During the second lockdown, around September, I read Carmen Maria Machado’s book In The Dream House for the first time. It was a graduation gift from my friend Molly. It’s so rare to happen upon a book, or any somewhat mainstream art really, about which you have no preconceived notions.
I’d somehow never seen it talked about online or even heard about it from friends. It turned out to be a life changing experience for me for many reasons, one of which was Machado’s capacity for searingly honest storytelling.
She quotes Dorothy Allison at the beginning of chapter five: ‘Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.’
Molly giving me the book was an act of love; my reading of it through to the end was an act of self-love. Beginning to think about telling your story in this way opened avenues for me in my own writing that had been heavily blocked, long before the lockdowns.
But in terms of attempting to write in pandemic times, it allowed me to exhale into the situation, rather than instinctively turn a blind eye and try to write as if it had never happened; like it wasn’t happening right now.
I suppose I struggled with the situation of wanting and needing to write but being unable to do so truthfully, without noticeable inflections of isolation or disease or separation permeating the language and the music.
Viewing acceptance of the current situation as an act of love allowed me to begin writing again, a couple of months into the pandemic, and to allow these inflections to come, marking my ideas and words and notes, and accepting them as realities in the moment of writing. So, a form of acceptance came and settled in, and I slowly started to come out of shock and into writing mode.
In an online workshop I took with guitarist and songwriter Buck Meek last month, he referred to his own periods of inspiration or prolifigacy as ‘seasons’ of writing. This resonated deeply with me as a metaphor for those couple of weeks at a time where creativity is flowing: working when there’s no mining to be done, because it’s all there on the surface, ready. These seasons come in cycles, and they bring with them their own unique collection of senses, words and thought processes.
For me, this most recent season has been rife with images of birds, pyramids, wild animals and the cold sea. These are related to finding comfort, it would seem, in thoughts of flight and weightlessness, of ancient beauty, and again, of natural cycles twinned with wild unpredictability. This is what I’ve been observing, I think, most consciously in the past year: a stillness or stuckness; the prospect of infinite lockdowns and days seeming to repeat themselves; coupled with the unstoppable force of everything around me changing in both minute and massive ways, all the time.
https://soundcloud.com/ellieoneillmusic/anna
The pandemic afforded me the privilege to slow down enough to actively watch the physical seasons of the year changing. I had the chance to feel the day it became too cold to swim for more than five minutes, and the day it finally warmed up again. Leaning into the fact that the seasons will return, renewed each time, has been deeply comforting; where I used to deny myself the right to repeat ideas or phrases or even chord progressions I instead began to lean into it, to try and see why they kept raising their heads. I’m beginning to remember that each new season will bring all new types of light and shade.
It’s been liberating also, to return to writing lyrics in the present tense about things from the past. The movement and immediacy of it has been like stretching out of the confinement of the days, a vibration that helps dissolve the walls of stuckness. Dredging up old stories you thought you were finished with feels nostalgic and sticky and whiny sometimes, but exploring them in the present tense makes them become dreamlike and fluid.
It’s been almost a way of travelling, for me, during this time of sudden and intense constrainment. Back to Montreal, back to Cork, back to when Dublin city didn’t feel completely empty. Time becomes irrelevant in this merging of tenses, if only to the writer, but that’s the liberation. After all, I am the first person I’m trying to communicate with, through all of it.
In a suburban Dublin pub ten men aged sixty and over have gathered in a circle each week to play traditional Irish tunes. I joined this weekly session when I moved back to Dublin and after initial bewilderment was embraced by the group. I was the only woman that had ever joined in the twenty odd years the session had existed and I grew to love the chats and the musical immersion that it became.
At some point in each tune set we all closed our eyes and it felt like it really didn’t matter that I was female.
I discussed with Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh in an interview recently how music can be something that rises above divisions and transcends gender, race and politics. Sadly of course, this is not always the case. It was disturbing last year to read the revelations of the Mise Fosta (Me Too) movement which detailed the experiences of young musicians in the Irish Traditional music scene. The reports, which came from mostly girls, consisted of unwanted physical contact, sexual assault, harassment and degradation.
It saddened me deeply to hear about the number of musicians that have left the scene due to this kind of behaviour. I’ve experienced both sides of this coin. I’ve met some of the kindest men I know through pub sessions in my journey back to playing music again publicly. And I’ve also experienced subtle and not-so-subtle forms of inappropriate physical contact and degrading comments from pub-goers, and from musicians themselves; followed by ‘sure it’s only a bit of craic.’ Unfortunately, it’s the kind of ‘craic’ that drives talent away from the scene.
A young female musician I spoke to recently described lecherous comments she often experiences online as the ‘cross we have to bear,’ as women in the industry. Another musician I know will avoid a particular number of sessions because of the consistent unwanted advances of a fellow musician who attends them.
This kind of behaviour has typically been quietly tolerated as ‘the cross we have to bear.’ But we are in an age of increasing disclosures in Ireland and globally regarding abuse of many shapes and kinds. (The recent harrowing revelations of the treatment of women in Mother and Baby Homes in Irelandis just one example of this).
Voices of all genders in Ireland have been heavily suppressed in relation to these matters so all speaking out must be applauded. In continuing to break this silence, we’re slowly becoming part of a wider global story, where the veil is being lifted on many forms of abuse and inequality. As humans we love to create categories of ‘me’ and ‘other’. We are better and the ‘other’ is lesser. Male-female, white-black, able bodied-disabled. Yet these hierarchies are slowly being dismantled all over the world. A huge amount of people are waking up to the realisation that these imagined hierarchies are cultural constructions which could easily have been otherwise and must be challenged.
Traversing a Wave of Change
Both men and women need support to traverse this wave of change. All genders need education at every stage of schooling about not just the concept of consent but what that looks like in real life circumstances. Inappropriate comments, contact and expectations need to become rejected in the music scene, in person and on-line, as well as on a cultural and societal level in Ireland. We need to release the shame attached to discussions around sexuality, around our bodies and what is and isn’t acceptable to us.
These types of conversations around sexuality have slowly been opening up in Ireland. The TV series Normal People last year opened avenues of discussion many of us had not foreseen (Liveline radio programme to name just one). My father was of the opinion that the series should be shown in every secondary school in the country to educate teenagers about healthy consent. I also had a lengthy conversation with my aunt, a religious sister in her seventies, about the portrayal of the lead character Connell’s refusal to hurt Marianne during sex as she requested.
‘That was exercising his right to say no,’ she’d said at the time. ‘It was very important to show that men need to be able to say no as well. It works both ways, you know.’ ‘’It does work both ways,’ I had agreed with her. It is not a case of ‘men vs women’ in this particular arena. That is not a narrative that I believe will get us any further.
We discussed how every person has both masculine and feminine elements within them which need to be developed. As a fundamental element of the patriarchal structure, to show emotions, for men, is often seen as a sign of weakness. And so men are typically encouraged from a young age to bottle up these more ‘feminine’ aspects of their character. Ireland has one of the top five highest rates of suicides for men aged 15-24 in Europe. There are clearly elements of the patriarchy which are not favouring men either. We are clearly missing a trick somewhere in preparing young people of all genders for adulthood.
Movements Forward
Some strong indicators are showing that we are on the right path. The Fair Plé movement which advocates for gender balance in the Irish Traditional & Folk scene has recently developed an Anti-Harassment Policy for use across all arts sectors and Sexual Harrassment guidelines in collaboration with the Rape Crisis Network Ireland, which are important steps towards highlighting and addressing these issues. These can be used by all pubs and music festivals and generating awareness of these policies is a key part of moving forward. The Speak Up ACTiON Survey is a survey of all arts workers and their workplace experiences which will inform policy and the development of artist supports for safe and dignified work spaces. Fair Plé and SAOI are also pushing for a neutral independent complaint structure with investigative powers across all arts sectors.(1)
Beyond the pub scene, the facts are staring us in the face that women’s voices are under-represented in the arts in general. Music consultant Linda Coogan Byrne and folk singer Áine Tyrrell published a Gender Disparity Data Report in 2020 highlighting that female artists take up less than 5% of airtime on Irish radios. The ‘Why Not Her’ campaign is currently making huge strides towards eradicating this bias.
Clearly it is not just revelations of abuse that are required to instigate change but cold hard facts and key players in the Irish Traditional Music scene are doing Trojan work towards developing these statistics.(2)
The Need for Women’s Voices & Men’s Support
I sincerely hope that women who have left the Traditional Irish music scene can come back and can feel safe in doing so. We need to hear women’s voices, in real time, performing. And we need to keep supporting each other as women in making this happen.
We can choose to silence ourselves also in many ways; through allowing internal critical voices to hold us back or by buying into the unwritten rules of the patriarchal structure we were brought up in that tell us our voices are less worthy of being heard.
Or we can do none of this and allow our voices to be heard. Write the song you’ve been humming for years. Pick up the instrument that’s gathering dust. Get up and dance at a session if that’s your thing. Take your place in the scene, with respect and kindness towards all genders, sexualities, races, people. Yet call it out when that respect is not shown back to you.
For men, you are more visible in the industry. Use your visibility to make sexual harassment and inequality no longer acceptable. It’s no longer enough just to not take part in sexist behaviour. Misogyny in all it’s subtle and not so subtle forms needs to be denied air time for good.
Music, to me, is the most powerful force on earth for bringing people together and none more so than Traditional Irish music. I believe we can figure this one out.
Louise O’Connor is a fiddle player, sean nós dancer and hosts Music As podcast where she interviews guests about the role music plays in their lives.
FairPlé have been working with SAOI, a group consisting of a mixture of women across the arts: poetry, literature, publishing, comedy and music. They are currently pushing for a neutral independent complaint structure with investigative powers, specifically for this to be set up by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media to deal with issues of sexual assault and harassment across the sector.
Statistics on the Irish Traditional and folk music scene have emerged in the work of Úna Ní Fhlannagáin, Úna Monaghan, Fintan Vallely and Jane Cassidy, and more work on this area will be visible in the forthcoming publication of Ethnomusicology Ireland on women and music.
Why Not Her? is a social media campaign and podcast launched by Linda Coogan Byrne to ‘amplify the voices of woman in the music, entertainment and arts industry.’
Irish Theatre Institute has launched Speak Up ACTiON Survey- a survey of all arts workers & their workplace experiences which will inform policy & the development of artist supports for safe & dignified work spaces. Complete the survey here:
One comment I hear most often is: “you are doing so many different things!” Followed by the inevitable question: “aren’t you doing too many different things?” What I detect behind this question is the idea that everyone should concentrate on a single discipline, and bring it to a certain standard of success within a capitalist system.
I used to identify as a violin-maker then transformed into a violinist; after that I settled on being a musician, and right now I see myself more as an artist with a scent of activism in the air. But my other shapes are still alive and well. I was never able to do just one thing, and I don’t want to be placed in a single category.
I chose to play the violin at the age of eight. One of the main reasons was my desire to be a princess, and thinking the violin would make a suitable instrument. The first time I dared go to a lesson without my mom I was allowed to choose a film I wanted to watch as a reward. I chose a Western, which seems a little unsuitable for a princess, but I liked the idea of being both a princess and a cowboy.
My background is in Classical music, but I soon realized there wasn’t only one type of music I wanted to concentrate on. My musical horizons broadened a lot through my first big love. She showed me artists that opened doors to new worlds. I spent hours in the CD section of the library in my hometown of Celle in Germany to find music that she might like too.
I became a big fan of Tori Amos and Fiona Apple and tried to sing and play their songs on the piano, when no one was home. I currently play with my first love in an underground duo, covering an unknown band that broke up around fifteen years ago. She plays an out-of-tune e-guitar and I play the three different beats I know on the drums, and we both drink beer.
Choosing to become a violin maker wasn’t only motivated by passion for this kind of work, but also because I was frightened of entering the professional music world as a Classical musician. After applying to study musical education I never showed up for the entrance exam. I felt that the pressure of the academic system would destroy my love of music, which for me is all about spontaneity, lightness and variety.
By that time I had already played in various Classical youth orchestras, as well as on the street with a group of friends. So violin-making was a way do dive deeper into the music world from a different perspective, while maintaining a diversity to what I played.
Image: Justina Jaruševičiūtė
Lisbon
After finishing my three year course in France to become a luthier, I moved to Lisbon, and worked in a violin maker’s shop for five years, where my first band came along.
I have always had an appetite for learning many different things. By that time I had begun learning Japanese, Swedish, and folk dancing, and experienced French culture. I had also taken piano lessons, singing lessons, double-bass and cello lessons. The list goes on.
I reached the highest point of trying out things in Lisbon. That beautiful city inspired all of my senses. I played in an orchestra, in two bands, for a theatre group, ‘The Lisbon Players;’ and people kept asking, “why I was taking ballet classes instead of concentrating just on the violin?”
In my view neat lines of separation should not be drawn between: musician or craftswoman; feeling ‘German’ or ‘Portuguese;’ being a shy girl or a party animal; a woman or a man. All these categories limit identities and are often unhelpful. We need to open a space for coexistence.
Musical Magic
This moment of convergence is when the magical music happens. When, on a stormy night in Sligo, I played with my band, The Loafing Heroes, the winds merged with the singing, and the alcoholic ecstasy; I found myself sinking into the sound of a wineglass, feeling the glass on my fingers that vibrated along with the waves in the air, connecting present and past feelings, all of us surrendering, and the universe surrendering.
I do not enter a different world or shape shift, but I bring something with me and act like a linking element between those worlds. And I unite the parts of worlds in myself.
To give an example: the dancing classes I took with wonderful Rita Lucas Coelho gave me new elements for composing music. She taught me the importance of repetition and stillness in dance, and these are also important elements in music. And life in general too.
Currently I live in Berlin. It’s the perfect place for people who love walking through different worlds. I have discovered Balkan music and been delighted to experience styles ranging from oriental funeral doom to opera.
Some Current Projects
With my folk trio Gerda Vejle we do exactly this type of merging. We cover songs from various countries and styles. What brings it all together is the three of us, our stories. I play the guitar in this trio, even though I am really just a beginner. Music doesn’t live from perfect technique. It helps if you develop it, but music happens as a connection between people and energies. Or a deeper connection with yourself, your story, other stories, and your body.
I play in another trio called Schnaps im Silbersee. It is much more focused on lyrics and merging comedy with tragedy. It was something completely new for me to be more direct in my performances and make people laugh.
Another project I want to present is called Simons Sofa. It is a studio space that opens a time-hole to a fourth dimension, inviting your creativity to flow on a wave of coziness and red wine. Those projects all leave their traces in my music and nourish each other.
Activism
Over the last few years I have felt a need to became more of an activist. As a “female” musician it is impossible to ignore the huge inequalities that still exist. There are small things, like that I get a lot more comments about my performance after concerts than male colleagues. Like constant little raindrops, they leave an impact.
It is mostly men that interrogate my performance about where I was standing on stage; why I wasn’t singing more; why I wasn’t singing louder; why I was moving so much or so little…
Also, sound technicians tend to treat me as if I don’t know how my own mic works. And I hear people say: “You will have a good show, as you have a good-looking violinist.” How can you feel valued as a musician after a comment like that?
Questions like that distract me, and make me question myself and my art. Insecurity stops the flow of creativity, and possibility to dive into a musical moment. So I need extra energy to let those comments pass over me, and remain focused on my art. If I want advice I will ask for it, thanks.
It’s not at a new topic, so I don’t want to describe in greater detail what a lot of female musicians face. It’s structural discrimination that we all experience.
Gender Diversity
There are many reasons why there are more men in music than women. I am playing with the singer Rosa Hoelger who adresses some of these topics in her music, which I appreciate a lot.
And I am part of a FLINT* (Female, Lesbian, Inter-sexual, non-binary, trans, queer) collective that gives birth to ideas to battle sexism. It is called Visibility-Breakfast, and has almost six hundred members. It was founded by Johanna Amelie and Julia Zoephel in 2017 and aims to enable personal, professional and artistic exchange within the Berlin FLINT* artistic community.
The objective is to increase the visibility of FLINT* artists in the creative industry and stand up for gender justice, enabling activism and creating the space and impulses for it.
Uncertain Times
In these uncertain times, I am curious to find out what the future has in store. I am sure new projects and people will find their way to me and I will find them, as long I keep my senses open and welcoming! As Tori Amos put it, I might even “become a snow witch or maybe a sandwich and melt away and that’s ok I think.”
Twelve years ago I was asked to sing a selection of traditional Irish love songs in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, for the launch of an anthology of Irish love poems. This collection had poems which were written over a period of 1,200 years, between 800 AD and the present era.
Whitefriar Street of course contains relics of the even older tragic hero of many a love story, St. Valentine, who was executed for marrying young couples at a time of prohibited love. However, as I read through the love poems in the collection, the earliest ones struck me for their vivid rawness. The first poem, The Lament of Créide starts with the striking words,
“The arrows that murder sleep At every hour of the cold night
are love lamenting”
In 8th century Gaelic these words have a sibilant, chilling cadence that invoke a dark and desperate trauma. Créide had just come on her lover Dínertach’s body on the battle field and grief menaced her mind.
The emotions depicted create a surge in me. This was something worth expressing with music I though. It has all the essence of human feeling that great and tragic drama is made of.
It sucked me into a renewed appreciation of early Irish mythology, and I started looking at other examples from the canon of early Irish literature, such as The Táin, for this exquisite portrayal of drama and character archetype. As a singer and a composer I found that these stories had an emotional and dramatic template that interested me.
These were stories that lasted throughout the centuries; that contained great dramatic archetypes. They described patterns of being that seemed timeless and epic. They were crying out for melody and musical interpretation.
In my journeys through these myths and historical perspectives I started to notice that character portrayal frequently represented archetypes within meta-narratives. Some of these archetypes could be found in similar thematic stories throughout the world. Cúchullain had his echo in Achilles, and Ferdia might be compared to the Trojan Hector.
These archetypes manifest values of what the 17th century Italian political philosopher Giambattista Vico called The Age of Gods. Nietzche calls this the age of heroes
I was using the modality of sean nós to interpret these stories through music, but it took me a long time to notice that perhaps I was doing so because folk music and folklore was a parable-ist way of interpreting these thematic issues and explanations of life, to the people who shared them. Traditional songs did indeed trade in the wisdom of fable and parable to enable an understanding of the world. It is a metaphorical world full of tropes and archetypes.
I needed to look deep into the psychology of folklore and folk songs to understand why the anthology of sean nós exists. This was my reason for an enlightening return to the roots of my tradition; to try and explain how this song tradition navigates a psychological portrayal of human nature.
Band Photography | Musicians | | Holst Photography Ireland
The following extract is the introduction to An Bhuatais & The Meaning of Life, a book and CD collection of contemplative songs and essays. It is a hard-backed 112 page edition, based on the philosophical themes of the accompanying CD. The CD and book are complementary elements of a contemplative philosophical experience:
A song, like a story, speaks from a time and a place. Time passes, and its voice diminishes. But sometimes a story speaks to the essence of human nature and its power lasts through time regardless of space; regardless of place.
An Bhuatais [The Boot – the album’s title track] has a context related to a changing social dynamic between the late 18th and early 19th century in Ireland. The native Catholic population of Ireland in the 17th century were suppressed by a series of penal laws designed to disenfranchise them and leave them firmly outside the protection of public and legal institutions of state. These penal codes were defined along sectarian divides which delineated the native Irish from the coloniser.
The native population had at least a religious institution which offered solace and sanctuary. The Catholic clergy who tended to this disenfranchised population were outlawed, and for a time had a bounty on their head. Sharing in the fate of their flock, they had spiritual and moral credibility.
The penal code relaxed over the 18th Century and in 1795 Catholicism was officially permitted into the fold, most visibly with the establishment of the Catholic University of Maynooth.
This is all interesting to our story because it makes the animosity of the author of An Bhuatais towards the local Priest all the more comprehensible. As opposed to the hunted priest of the recently repealed Penal period, the priest in this song clearly doesn’t suffer along with his parishioners. He doesn’t share the suffering of the songs author; he is not one of the people. He is castigated for abandoning spirituality for profane wealth. Betrayal and hypocrisy; they are powerful themes, and they incite gut felt creativity.
There is something basic and fundamental in the representation of the hero in the tragic mythological perspective. Friedrich Nietzsche, the harbinger of resurgent nihilism, recognised this in his analysis of the heroic archetype. This helped him form theories on the pre-eminence of the dominant will – the natural state of an amoral being – and the end of belief. While it is a helpful filter on the mythological perspective of death, it is a perspective which creates a lot more problems than it solves.
Illusions of “the end of history” and the implication that we have no more to learn from the past are, it seems, endemic with humanity. It’s an arrogance which seems to consistently blind our species. The American playwright, Arthur Miller, enacts this folly in the character of Judge Thomas Danforth in The Crucible, where he says: “This is a sharp time, now, a precise time – we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.”
Danforth’s error, and burning certainty, illuminate something that has been observed by historians of civilisation throughout the ages. Ibn Khaldun and others have told us that civilisations and empires flourish and wither in cycles. Giambattista Vico, argued that the cycle of civilisations went through three stages which he called: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men. Although he is ruled by superstition, Danforth’s speech is paradoxically of the “Age of Men”. His certainty that the institution of his court is the nexus of reason is an arrogance of every age. The “precise time” he talks of is his certainty in the error of past ages and the enlightenment of his own.
Vico’s theory tells us that the age of reason is an epoch, not a culmination. That man-kind keeps cycling through the spiral of civilisational rise and fall, and that we keep refining our myths and reinventing our stories.
Stories and songs can carry more than eternal narratives. I recall a drive on a narrow rural road, playing a recording of An Captain Ó Máille sung by Stiofán Ó Cualáin, and feeling an overwhelming sense of belonging; of returning home. O Cualáin’s unaccompanied phrasing, which emanates a familiarity with landscape, living, and language, has a close familial sense.
His performance – though I think performance is the wrong word for something that sounded so spontaneous and lived in – is unique, and I was surprised by how much I felt I knew intimately the essence of what this voice carried. This singing has its own inscape. It’s one that is as much shaped by cultural phenotype as by the rugged landscape of Connemara. I felt my soul could make its home there.
An Bhuatais & The Meaning of Life is available through:
