Toner Quinn

A recording of a late-night session in our hotel in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, during the Shark Taronalari festival in August 2011. I heard this song regularly in late-night sessions over the ten days we were there. Apparently it’s a popular wedding song. Would love to know more about it. The singer and most of the musicians are Turkish, joined by Uzbeki and Israeli percussionists.

These are two reels, Radharc na Rún followed by Ríl an Ráithín.

Toner Quinn (fiddle) – Live at the Steeple Sessions, Dublin, 19 July 2011 by Toner Quinn

I recently accompanied this silent film at the Galway Film Fleadh. Made in Kerry by the New York Kalem Film Company in 1912, it tells the story of a violinist who is discovered by American tourists and brought to the States where he becomes highly successful. Then his mother shows up!

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The New York based Kalem Film Company first came to Ireland in 1910 to make the short film The Lad from Old Ireland. This was the first ever transatlantic film production and the first fiction film made in Ireland. Led by actor/director Sidney Olcott and actor/writer Gene Gauntier, they returned to Ireland several times to produce a series of Irish themed films and earned themselves the nickname the O’Kalems in the process.

Between 1910 and 1915 the O’Kalems made and released almost thirty films adapted from well-known songs, poems and dramas or original scenarios dealing with Irish history or the experience of emigration to the United States. They were extremely popular with American audiences and laid some of the templates and stereotypes that defined Hollywood perspectives on Ireland over the next half century.

Cast: Jack J Clark (Terence, the violinist), Anna Clark (Terence’s mother), J P McGowan (John Foster, an American banker). Gene Gauntier (Foster’s daughter), Alice Hollister, Arthur Donaldson.

Producer/Director: Sidney Olcott

Notes for a Music Network traditional music tour with Olov Johansson, nyckelharpa; Tom Morrow, fiddle, viola; Gerry O’Beirne, guitars, ukulele & vocals; and Conor Byrne, flutes, guitar & vocals. 12–19 May 2011. http://bit.ly/jmSbvN

I am looking at another wretched economic chart in the newspaper, a numerical history of the Celtic Tiger, full of nine-zero figures, rises and falls, if onlys, told you sos and excuses, when my eye reaches the summer of 2006. What an intense period that was, the graph line almost hitting the top of the chart. After that, things aren’t so spectacular. Never mind. Here’s something more interesting than economics: did you know that around 2006 there was a minor migration of musicians, composers and artists away from the heart of Celtic Tiger Dublin? Call it artist’s instinct, or the spread of broadband, or economics, but it happened. They headed to the west coast and to other parts of the country, quite independently and all at around the same time. The numbers were small, but because I was one I couldn’t help noticing the pattern. One often imagines one is acting alone, but we are inevitably part of collective movements, migrations and shifts.

Cultural shifts such as this are sometimes part of something even larger. In the 60s and 70s in Ireland, there was a particularly intense example when people were moving to the west, often to the Irish-speaking areas, looking for their roots, escaping from the nascent consumerism. These migrants could only have been slightly aware that similar movements were happening all over Western Europe. In Electric Eden, Rob Young’s recent book on British folk music, he explores the ‘inward exodus’, the ‘search for eden’ that was happening in Britain in the late 1960s and 70s and the impact this had on music. In Brittany in Northern France, a similar return to roots was under way. This Music Network tour reminds us that in Sweden an equally seminal shift was taking place: the Gröna vågen, or ‘green wave’ – ‘green’ as in the land. It is to this Gröna vågen – this return to the land and a new appreciation of native culture – that we owe the re-emergence of the Swedish national instrument, the nyckelharpa, in the 1970s, and why Olov Johansson, its modern master, started playing in the first place.

The nyckelharpa, like the uilleann pipes in Ireland, had a mere 50 players or so in the mid-twentieth century, with a corresponding tiny number of makers of the instrument. And as with the establishment of Na Píobairí Uilleann by a group of pipers in 1968, in the 1970s a group of concerned enthusiasts asked a leading nyckelharpa exponent of the time, Eric Sahlström, who Johansson describes as a ‘bright shining star’, to begin a series of night-classes where people could learn to make and play their own instrument. Many nyckelharpas were made – of varying quality – but the practice of making and playing became extremely popular. As Johansson explains, ‘I still get this question from older people when I’m touring around Sweden – did you make it yourself?’ Sahlström ended up teaching nyckelharpa throughout Uppland on the east coast of the country, and then throughout Sweden, and gradually the number of exponents reached critical mass.

Today the number of nyckelharpa players is in the thousands and there is even an American Nyckelharpa Association. Translated as ‘keyed harp’, it has been played in Sweden, in one form or another, for over 650 years. The modern chromatic instrument has 16 strings and about 37 wooden keys arranged to slide under the strings. It has a three-octave range, beginning from the same low G as the fiddle, and like the latter is played with a bow. (For context, I should mention that the Swedish-Irish connection in this tour resonates with a growing interest among Irish traditional musicians in the repertoire and instrumentation of the Nordic countries, probably because of the strong fiddle traditions – Irish fiddle-players such as Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh of Altan and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh now also perform on Norway’s hardingfele, or hardanger fiddle.)

It was Conor Byrne who suggested that Olov Johansson join himself, Tom Morrow and Gerry O’Beirne on this tour. Conscious of the longstanding connection between Dervish, of which Morrow is a member, and Johansson’s group Väsen (the bands have toured and recorded together, with a particularly memorable result – ‘Josefin’s Waltz’– on Dervish’s 1996 album At the End of the Day), it was the ideal, imaginative twist to the venture, and yet it’s a new departure for all four to work together. Like more and more musical collaborations today, the digital visual telephone service Skype has played a key role in rehearsals, allowing the musicians to swap tunes and discuss repertoire, emailing MP3s of tunes in order to learn and develop arrangements. While flute-player Byrne from Dublin and fiddler Morrow from Leitrim have been playing together since their teenage years, Johansson has been ‘trying to find the flow, energy and drive that I hear in their playing using my instrument and my playing technique, and the possibilities I have with those. I’m trying to pick up a few things that are new to me from their playing, and also add things from my experience.’ As a musical collaborator, Johansson has form. His recent CD with Scottish harpist Catriona McKay, Foogy, is a striking example of how he can stretch his aesthetic. For this tour he has also composed some new pieces, including one called ‘Going Green’.

Conor Byrne and Tom Morrow are also composers in their own right – the latter’s ‘Siesta’ set of tunes is now an established part of Dervish’s set, while Byrne’s 2003 duet album with fiddler Méabh O’Hare, Bavan, is enriched by a range of his compositions. I have yet to have the opportunity to hear Morrow and Byrne perform as a duet, but listening to them solo, one can imagine the affinity that exists between their playing. They are bound by a precision, passion and intensity that creates sharp, keen lines of melody – it means any diversion, any subtle step to the right or left of the tune, can have a multiplier effect on the intensity of the performance. And the exploratory nature of the tour means their ensemble will inevitably develop over the seven concert stops, their familiarity with eachother’s playing reimagined in the new light of Johansson and Gerry O’Beirne.

Gerry O’Beirne is well placed to push the music in different directions. A true original as a songwriter, singer and musician, his contribution to traditional music as a record producer, including Promenade, the 1979 groundbreaking duet album by Kevin Burke and Mícheál Ó Domhnaill, has been a regular spark in traditional music over four decades. O’Beirne’s approach to lyrics and way with melody give him a distinct aesthetic within traditional Irish music, and yet he has somehow merged it into the genre. His setting of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Free Soul’ on his album with the fiddle-player Rosie Shipley, Yesterday I Saw the Earth Beautiful, is an inspired journey through the poet’s words, O’Beirne’s floating melody and delivery finding their way around the message with intelligence and restraint.

Given the reference to travelling west at the beginning, one has to mention that O’Beirne has written the definitive song on this impulse, ‘Western Highway’, made famous by Maura O’Connell in the 1980s and more recently recorded by TG4 singer of the year, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh. As O’Beirne has written, ‘It’s a love song, a travelling song’ and every migrant, whether in Ireland, Britain or Uppland, can connect with the words, for it captures what they are always looking for: ‘I am a driver on a western highway / From the mountains and to the sea / And there’s a song on the western highway / Saying I will be free.’

Notes for a Music Network traditional music tour by Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, voice, flute; John Wynne, flute; John McEvoy, fiddle; and John Blake, guitar, flute, bouzouki. 12–21 January 2011.

How often do we consider the significance of crossing Ireland’s longest river? For centuries, the Shannon was a divider in this country, separating Connacht from the rest of Ireland, and often key to its defence. Now the water’s impact is concealed, a ten-second flash of blue expanse as you travel across it on the motorway. The Shannon’s power is not lost on Roscommon though, its eastern border, its personality, literally defined by it.

These thoughts never occurred to me when I stood in Doorly’s Corner House bar in Roscommon Town in the summer of 2009. Separated from a packed music session by a pub partition, I stood up on a cushioned bench to take a peak. In amongst half-a-dozen flutes, an accordion, teenagers on fiddle, and a haze of others, John Wynne played hour upon hour among his community. I hopped up and down for much of the evening, trying to time my short inhalations of music to catch John, or perhaps his former teacher, Patsy Hanley, in full flight.

The occasion was the launch of John Wynne’s second album, Ar Nós na Gaoithe, and how the precision and control of the recording contrasted perfectly with the loosened approach of the session. But every now and then there would be a breach in the collective hum and Wynne’s music would leap out. As the night developed, I understood better why John places such an emphasis on the Roscommon roots of his music. It’s about more than geography and history; it’s the community of musicians and listeners that inhabit the county, that nourish him.

Towards the end of the evening, an Englishman, another flute-player, told me of leaving the UK and coming to live in Roscommon because his father came from there. A construction worker, the lull in the industry – and this is over a year and a half ago – didn’t discourage him. It was Roscommon’s cultural richness that he was looking for; the land of flute-players (the Chieftains’ Matt Molloy among them); county of the village Keadue where the harper Carolan lived and wrote much of his music; the place that produced Douglas Hyde and where the experience of hearing Irish-speaking locals generated the passion that bore the Gaelic League; the birthplace of the great songwriter Percy French.

Ostensibly, the title of this tour, ‘Crossing the Shannon’, is because three of the musicians grew up in, or have connections with, the west of Ireland. Roscommon is not only John Wynne’s homeplace, but also where Birmingham-born John McEvoy’s parents come from. Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, having grown up in Dún Chaoin, immersed in the culture of the West Kerry Gaeltacht, now lives in Murroe, Co. Limerick. Though reared in London, John Blake is no stranger to the west, having lived in Ennis and Galway previously. In fact, a connection with the west is almost a prerequisite for all Irish traditional musicians. Crossing the Shannon, whether to Miltown Malbay, Ennis, Connemara, Galway, Roscommon, Sligo, Westport or any other spot where music spills out, is part of a traditional musician’s apprenticeship.

The musical style of Wynne and McEvoy is in part defined by their repertoire – the versions of tunes that they have absorbed from the musicians of Roscommon over the years – but also by their rhythmic approach. Highly ornamentative and always flowing, it is brisk music that points to the modern flute-playing legends of the North Connaught area, Peter Horan (who only died last October aged 84), Séamus Tansey and Matt Molloy, and fiddle-players such as Paddy Ryan and Kevin and Jack Cullen.

There is an instinctive understanding between the two. On ‘The Mountain Top’ and ‘Ciaran’s Reel’ on Pride of the West, when the momentum of the tune calls for a spike of intensity, they speed up together for just the briefest of moments, only to revert to the regular tempo a second later. It’s the kind of flexibility with repertoire that is made possible with a genuine connection.

As soloists, the apparently relaxed approach of McEvoy’s fiddle-playing betrays the complexity in fingerwork and bowing that is ongoing all the time. Deploying the full range of ornamentative techniques but using variation carefully, it’s a style that can also be heard in his fiddle-playing son Conor. Despite this elaborate paddling beneath the water’s surface, John McEvoy manages to create a sense of great space in his music, suiting Wynne as a flute-player and in part explaining the success of the duet.

Wynne’s solo playing is often a tour de force of expression and ornamentation, his interpretations of tunes forever turning this way and that, allowing all the diversity of contemporary traditional flute-playing come in to play. At times a detonation of virtuosity, Wynne’s precise approach always keeps the tune within command. With a diverse solo repertoire, he is capable of a variety of approaches and that flexibility makes him an ideal duet partner.

Similarly so with John Blake. The accompanist of choice for a new generation of traditional musicians, his partnership with flute-player Harry Bradley and fiddle-player Jesse Smith in particular, working under the title Tap Room Trio, produced one of the most electric albums of the noughties, a recording of momentum and colour that never seemed to pause to take a breath. John is a key musician in the traditional music scene that you will see in many different guises, playing flute in sessions, piano with the Tap Room Trio, guitar with fiddlers Liz and Yvonne Kane or Liam O’Connor, bouzouki with others, his ability to adapt and respond to the mood of soloists always finds him in demand. A subtle guitarist, the fact that he is a terrific flute-player also adds to the dimension he will bring to Wynne and McEvoy’s music, and to Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh’s song.

Over the past ten years, Nic Amhlaoibh has emerged as not just one of the south-west’s most gifted artists, but also one of the finest Irish singers of her generation – in all genres. The exquisite timbre and low register of her voice is regularly remarked upon, but it is her courage as a singer, her willingness to allow herself to be entirely absorbed by a song, that also stands out. Her focus as an artist allows her to tackle a broad repertoire, from big songs such as ‘Boys of Barr na Sráide’ or the traditional ‘Slán le Máigh’, which she has made her own, to the contemporary, crafted beauty of Richard Thompson’s ‘Persuasion’ or ‘Never Tire of the Road’ by Andy Irvine. The latter has such a distinctive songwriting and singing style that it any rendition requires a real command of the material. Or consider her album Dual with the Scottish singer Julie Fowlis in which she slips in and out of Irish and Scots repertoire and language. An exciting collaboration, it speaks of an artist whose rich cultural background has provided a love of singing and songs that, to our benefit, can move in many directions.

Her influence is growing all the time, as I learned from my own local session in Conamara. An evocative song named ‘County Down’ which has been regularly performed there for months was written by Tommy Sands, but it is Muireann’s interpretation which she recorded with Danú in 2003 that is responsible for it becoming so popular. For a song to find its way into sessions so relatively quickly points to a significant artist at work.

There is one more possible river-twist to this tour in that Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and John McEvoy play traditional flute too, meaning the chance of a set of tunes played by all four during the concerts is high. A group of flutes at high velocity, that vibrant sound that North Connaught has made its own, is just one of the pleasures that people have for ever been crossing the Shannon to hear.

Notes for a Music Network traditional music tour by Matt Cranitch, fiddle, Jackie Daly, accordion, and John Faulkner, voice, guitar, bouzouki. 14 – 23 September 2010.

It is the spring of 1996, mid-morning. Standing in the kitchen of my apartment, the kettle is boiling. As it gradually quietens and slows to its ‘click’, a track of violin and piano comes into aural focus. I had put on Matt Cranitch’s 1984 LP, Éistigh Seal, as I left the sitting room, and overwhelmed by the sound of boiling water, it was half-way through the opening air, ‘An raibh tú ag an gcarraig?’ (‘Were you at the rock?’), before I could hear it. I’d listened to it before of course, but some of the most magical recordings are often like new neighbours. You see them often, but never really connect. Then one day, for whatever reason, you engage with them, and you wonder why you never did before. Similarly, at that boiling-kettle moment, Éistigh Seal had fully arrived for me, its qualities of stillness and control finally coming into focus.

Éistigh Seal (‘Listen awhile’) is an album of twelve slow airs. It is an uncompromising record in many ways. Although it includes pieces that may be considered well-known – versions of the ‘The Coolin’ or ‘The Derry Air’ – there is little hint of the worldwide popularity of these melodies, Cranitch reclaiming them from the over-the-top versions that abound, and leading them back into the Sliabh Luachra tradition that he personally identifies with.

There is little place elsewhere I can go at this point without mentioning the great influence Sliabh Luachra (literally,‘the rushy mountain’) has had on Matt Cranitch and Jackie Daly, and the fact that they are exquisite exponents of it. A loose geographic area found on both sides of the Cork-Kerry border, its centre could be said to be between the towns of Killarney, Rathmore, Millstreet, Ballydesmond and Castleisland. But I want to unsettle this slightly one-dimensional idea for a moment, because what actually strikes one about these two musicians, not to mention John Faulkner, is just how multi-dimensional they are – artists of many different parts despite their association with such a strong musical centre.

Yet who says that Sliabh Luachra isn’t a multi-dimensional tradition?

Consider one of the definitive LPs of Sliabh Luachra music, Séamus Ennis’s 1952 recording for the BBC of fiddle-players Pádraig O’Keeffe, Denis Murphy and Julia Clifford, later issued as Kerry Fiddles by the Topic label in 1977. Murphy and Clifford, brother and sister, were both pupils of O’Keeffe’s, and subsequently lived much of their lives in New York and London respectively, but they were back for a short period when Ennis – whose opportunism and ability to coax the finest of artists has enriched us greatly – seized the opportunity to record all three in Charlie Horan’s Bar in Castleisland. Three musicians whose musical experience was intertwined, all local to the area, and yet musicians whose lived experience was quite different and who were exploring different sounds: Murphy’s virtuosity and pulsing rhythm on ‘The Woman of the House’ contrasting with O’Keeffe’s more refined approach on hornpipes such as ‘The Fisherman’s’, and noticeably different again to Clifford’s lighter, sparkling touch on ‘Paudeen O’Rafferty’. It is one of the wonders of Irish traditional music, that even within what appears to be a definitive example of a certain style, there exists a depth of diversity within.

When we think of Sliabh Luachra music, we think of the dance – the two are intertwined. Matt Cranitch’s playing is imbued with this quality, and more besides. His musical output has swept from being a member of the pared-down traditional group Na Filí in the 1960s and 70s, to the group Any Old Time in the 1980s, the sound of which was often more akin to old-time American and bluegrass, and then in more recent years playing with the vibrant trio Sliabh Notes. And yet, I think of his live recording with the late, great fiddle-player Séamus Creagh from a recent Masters of Tradition Festival in Cork – heaving with the energy and abandon of Sliabh Luachra – and we could just as easily be back in the world of Kerry Fiddles in 1952…

It was actually another duet with Séamus Creagh, this time with Jackie Daly, on the Gael-Linn label in 1977, that was largely credited with popularising the Sliabh Luachra style outside its own area. Combined with Jackie Daly’s solo recording of the same year, the thrilling, punchy playing established Daly as a leading force in accordion playing in Ireland, and arguably lifted the status of the instrument in the tradition as a whole. His playing also caught the attention of the new Galway group Dé Dannan. In an interview in the Journal of Music in Ireland in 2004, fiddle-player Frankie Gavin recalls travelling with Alec Finn to Joe Galligan’s folk-club outside of Ennis, where Daly was playing, with the express purpose of convincing him to join the band. His four years with Dé Dannan not only produced classic recordings such as Star-Spangled Molly and The Mist Covered Mountain, but also a surprise hit record in 1980 with the group’s version of ‘Hey Jude’, for which Daly wrote the reel that accompanies it.

Traditional music sessions today are now peppered with Daly’s compositions. At around the same time as I was getting to know Éistigh Seal, I worked in a record shop, one of the advantages of which was sampling new recordings as they came in. On the arrival of Daly’s second solo album, Domhnach is Dálach/Many’s a Wild Night, I can recall my intrigue at track 7, ‘The Fly Fishing Reel’, and, convinced it was some inspired composition from some far away place, I made a mental note to learn it. I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was from the hand of Daly himself.

What defines Daly’s recorded output more so however – and there are seventeen multi-faceted group albums along with his solo and duet recordings – is his unique rhythm and an ability to push a tune forward in a quietly intense way, punctuating it every now and then with killer bass notes and ‘cuts’ (grace notes) that appear like sparks in the melody.

If there is one bond connecting the music of Daly and Cranitch today, captured in their new album The Living Stream (after which this tour is named), and Kerry Fiddles fifty-eight years ago, it is the characteristic of precision. Pádraig O’Keeffe was said to insist on it in his pupils’ playing, so necessary was it for dancers. When Daly’s finely-tuned musical instincts combine with Cranitch’s flowing rhythm, the note-for-note precision stands out, the perfect amount of pressure applied to each rise and fall.

Accompanying such music requires a specialist in providing the space and subtlety it requires. Over more than three decades on the traditional music scene, John Faulkner has quietly set himself apart as someone with the ear to bring out the best in artists. His celebrated partnership with Dolores Keane in the 1980s produced several seminal recordings, including Broken Hearted I’ll Wander and Sail Óg Rua (featuring an achingly beautiful version of ‘Galway Bay’), both characterised by a thoughtful and crafted approach to repertoire and arrangement. Throughout his work with Keane, Faulkner always tried to bring something new to traditional music, whether it was combining uilleann pipes and piano on their version of ‘Jimmy Mo Mhíle Stór’ or bringing in the Dougie MacLean song ‘Caledonia’ which became one of her most popular recordings, or developing intricate harmonies for their duet singing. Although songwriting was not as much a part of his work in the 1980s as it is today, he penned ‘Lion in a Cage’, about Nelson Mandela, which Keane recorded in 1989 and which is probably the most popular song about the inspiring leader to come out of Ireland.

A singer with a natural ability to get under the skin of a story, Faulkner was recently appointed artist-in-residence in both Galway city and county. Involving a series of performances in local libraries and also in the Galway City Museum, the experience allowed him research and develop a repertoire of song drawing on different themes, whether it be love, sea or the surrounding area in Galway, and engage with audiences in a new way.

Currently in the process of recording an album of his own songs, Faulkner’s repertoire is a still a mix of traditional and new – and some which walk a line between: a typical example would be ‘Will Ye Go to Flanders?’. Having learned and recorded it many years ago, he has since added verses of his own. Aside from his regular performances in Ireland, Faulkner is also the singer with the Belgian folk group Orion.

Although Faulkner, Cranitch and Daly have played together sporadically in concerts and sessions over the years, it was in early 2008 that Faulkner and Daly started playing together regularly, and have since undertaken tours in Austria and Paris. This will be the first time the trio have toured together.

A singer, producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a writer of music for film and television, John Faulkner is the consummate multi-dimensional musician – which should suit Sliabh Luachra music right down to its rushy mountain ground…

Funding for the arts is essential, but without the right approach it can blunt artists’ entrepreneurial skills.

Mary is an artist and she has an idea. Something big. An arts venture that could make a real splash, nationally, internationally, the lot. It could also earn her money. Serious money. She would be her own boss. She would employ and inspire artists, connect them with new audiences, and really make a difference. She won’t let anyone stop her. Her heart is beating with excitement. She is going to do it before anyone else does. Just you wait.

Where does she start? She’s going to need money. She goes with what she knows. She downloads an arts council application form. Her heart slows down. The only grants for a new project are between one and five thousand euro, and she’ll have to wait for a decision. Still, it would be a start. She doesn’t see anybody else waving money at her.

She begins to put shape on her idea, tailoring it to match the criteria. Three months later, she receives a grant for two thousand euro. Not quite what she was expecting, but she is grateful, and begins to put her plan into action.

The smaller scale means it’s harder to get the ball rolling. When she is finally up and running she doesn’t make the splash she expected, and sees her small funds deplete quite quickly. She tells herself that if she can hang on until the next round of funding decisions, she could keep it going. Incredibly, because she has a flair for enterprise, she does just that.

She had been planning to give up her various day-jobs so that she can concentrate on her new venture, but that will have to wait. In the years that pass, she balances keeping her enterprise going and making a living doing other things. It’s a great accomplishment in many ways, impressive the way she keeps it all in the air, balancing so many demands and producing work of real quality, but in her heart she knows it’s not having the impact she once dreamed of.

Grant applications come and go, she learns more about drawing upon state funding, and gradually her dependency on state funding deepens. Many of her colleagues are in the same boat. At arts conferences and networking opportunities they tell each other how difficult it is. They are trying every technique they can think of to make more money, but it is just so hard….

Sound familiar?

This is the tale of many artists and their enterprising ideas. What could have been a significant initiative is taken down a peg because of the nature of arts funding, and it then struggles to reach its full potential. Our heroine’s lack of awareness of what she was really starting on the one side, and an arts funding body’s lack of preparation for her energy and ideas on the other, and the great idea falls between the cracks.

We should be better at ensuring this doesn’t happen. The arts are a breeding-ground for entrepreneurs. It is second-nature to the scene because it is full of creative, passionate people, consumed by a need to create. Many of the great arts enterprises that we have today are the result of a small group of people with a lot of passion and very little money. For funding in the past, they made do with volunteerism, private support from business and the good will of the public. With an increase in state funding for the arts however, many arts initiatives of the last decade and more have grown up entirely under the wing of an arts funding body, and are heavily reliant upon it, seemingly interminably. The result is that, for all their positive aspects, arts funding bodies today are actually blunting the entrepreneurial skills of creative people.

This is not an argument for the dismantling of state arts funding, though plenty of ideologues would wish it to be. Rather, it suggests that arts funding bodies need to be better equipped to deal with ambitious enterprise growth, and the real capabilities of artists.

Consider Mary, the artist-entrepreneur, someone who has worked as an artist, whose formative experiences have been in the arts, but who is now thinking anew about how to push that work into the world, putting herself, her colleagues, her region, her country, on the world map. Because of the small scale and slow growth of arts funding, instead of getting the full extent of her vision, what we get is a radically scaled-down version of her ideas in order to achieve some security and to accommodate the precariousness of year-to-year funding. This is not to say that every big new arts idea deserves support, but for state arts infrastructure to dampen enthusiasm through mal-fitting subsidy before it even gets off the ground is counter-productive.

The result of this is that an artist’s gut entrepreneurial instinct, the sharpness and natural business acumen that they may have, combined with an ability to produce work of real integrity and strength, is gradually dulled, tempered and cooled. As with Mary, it may simply become all about the grant.

State arts funding through arts councils and other bodies is a great triumph for modern, civilised society. In supporting artists to produce work that enriches our minds and lives immeasurably, in developing documentative organisations that record our culture, ensuring its safety and access for generations to come, and in growing an infrastructure of resource and event organisations within which new imaginative initiatives can come about, their importance should be undisputed.

However, the artist-entrepreneur is consistently frustrated by them. These people are looking to combine cultural value with commercial acumen. By their nature, their ideas will struggle to fit into any grant application or criteria, in part because many arts councils don’t allow an organisation to be profit making, but also because traditionally that is not what we have expected of them.

But why should arts funding bodies bother with them at all? The reality is that these people are going to land in the lap of arts offices and councils whether they like it or not. For someone working in the arts who sees an opportunity to develop an arts venture or business, the arts council or arts office is going to be their first point of call. They may even receive some funding, but if it is the wrong type we will not see them achieve their potential. If arts councils really want to start talking about the ‘economic value of the arts’, they have got to start coming to grip with such people in a productive way. A significant shift is needed.

A first step is to acknowledge that these people are there and to decide on a strategy for dealing with them. It may well be that their ideas will eventually find a different channel for development, but to be equipped to contribute to that process puts arts bodies at the very centre of the economy, as opposed to a sector feeding off it, which is often the cynical public and political perception. Part of that is ensuring that funding organisations have staff who have a track record in enterprise, in starting and running ventures, and who can get the best out of enterprising individuals.

For suitable ideas, a second step is to establish programmes which are more akin to seed funding, seeking business plans for ambitious enterprises and not just grant applications. Introducing larger-scale, short-term seed-funding rather than building up to a modest grant over a decade would encourage much more enterprising thinking at the beginning, a clearer understanding of what all parties are getting into, would attract additional sources of funding, and would encourage groups of like-minded people to come together, rather than everything being a small, solo effort because that’s all the funding will allow.

The third step is to attach any such funding to a mentoring programme. Artist-entrepreneurs may have the essential resources of ideas and energy, but the consistent advice of someone who has done it all before – and made the mistakes already – would be key in ensuring that the best use is made of precious resources.

Right now, there are people in the arts who are burning with ambition. They have ideas and energy and are willing to give a project all of their time. With the right strategy, it could have a profound effect on our cultural life. These people aren’t hidden away. They are there among the piles of applications and grants. Let them have the big idea, and let’s see it happen.

In the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland, visitors are sometimes frustrated because they speak Irish to locals and are responded to in English. It doesn’t take long for them to give up altogether, deciding that the language is actually truly dead in the area.

I am always intrigued by this black-and-white conclusion from what is a complex social experience. Although Irish is a language in crisis, the ultimate decision of the local native speaker as to the language they speak – whatever it may be – is not considered equal to that of the visitor. The former is presumed to be constant, single-purposed and predictable, and ultimately disappoints. The result is a hardening of the sides, and the language not growing.

There is a correlation with music: those coming from one culture to another often experience the same pattern of expectation, engagement, disappointment and withdrawal. Whether a pop musician engaging with classical music, a traditional musician exploring jazz, or an electronic artist experimenting with folk, what one presumes of the other genre will ultimately decide the meeting’s level of success. If we assume that a musical culture is something fixed and constant, the result will likely be a form of ossification, an overdose of order. Our attitude to other musical cultures is surely a reflection of our own musical views: if we ourselves enjoy a culture of openness, excitement and ease of collaboration, that is what we will find elsewhere. Conversely, if another genre is found to be slow to change, it is probably an indication of our own conservatism.

Often in the Irish-speaking areas, the Irish language actually flows once people have a chance to simply get to know each other. In this issue of The Journal of Music, we explore various sides of traditional and folk music, where we see the result of a more profound engagement.