Something that I never anticipated happening when I started The Journal of Music in Ireland was that my playing identity would become subsumed by it. Before I wrote, I played, but when I began writing about music, when the phone would ring, suddenly it was to ask me to write about a concert rather than play at it. I began to suspect that, subconsciously, I had done this to myself.

When my own children began playing music, the topic weighed on my mind. Was I showing them who I really was? I began to play in sessions more, to try and find a balance, but the ethos of the session does not always give you the space to find your voice. And yet something shifted: I received an invitation to play a concert in Dublin with the fiddle player Malachy Bourke; it was recorded, and Benedict Schlepper-Connolly and Garrett Sholdice suggested they release it on their Ergodos label. Live at the Steeple Sessions appeared in 2013. What followed were two years of concerts, culminating in a solo performance organised by Ergodos where I performed a piece for tape and fiddle about the housing crisis. I felt I was the musician and composer again. I had confronted the past.

There was one problem: I had almost completely stopped writing.

I began to realise that music and writing were drawing on the same creative energy; when I played, I hardly wrote, and when I wrote, I seldom played, but this left it unresolved. I started to tune into my creativity more, to wait for the impulse to play or write, and to observe when it arrived and why. I also began to assert my dual identity: when people asked me what I did, I said I was a writer and musician, though I was still not sure.

As The Journal of Music in Ireland grew, it eclipsed my musical efforts, and I was back to being someone else: the Editor. The creative tangle never went away. I wondered about this strange experience of playing music and unsettled myself with the thought that maybe music was the distraction and writing and editing was what I should focus on. Was balance possible? Was it all a mistake?

And on it went: writing would take over, playing would bubble up, and vice versa. I had almost given up on understanding, but when I published a book of my music essays, What Ireland Can Teach the World About Music, Martin Hayes asked me to come to the Masters of Tradition festival in Bantry to speak about the book and open a concert playing solo. Having accepted the imbalance, I was apprehensive. Who was I now? Did I know, or did it matter? I embraced it, played one of my own compositions and the concert and talk went well. As I sat alone back at the hotel that night, I stared into space, almost elated: is this balance?

After Bantry, I returned to writing and editing and playing faded away. It niggled, but I thought that Masters of Tradition was never going to be bettered and I should let the question rest. In addition, my children, now through the teenage years, started to play more, to talk to me about fiddle playing, and that heartened me.

But a year after Bantry, an unexpected email arrived from Darach Mac Con Iomaire, Artistic Director of Stiúideo Cuan, inviting me to be one of four artists-in-residence for ten weeks, along with the actor Diarmuid de Faoite, the singer Mairéad Ní Fhlatharta, and the poet Máire Holmes.

I knew Darach well: I had served on the board of Stiúideo Cuan when it opened, but our conversations were usually about board business and practical matters. I had accepted that my musical identity had wandered off again, maybe to never return. But I knew I would regret not doing the residency. His vision was clear: it was up to us to use the ten weeks as we saw fit – total freedom, see where it leads. The four of us would meet every Thursday evening – the public was welcome to be a part of it. We would perform pieces we had been working on and conversation would ensue. Éilís Lennon, co-founder of Stiúideo Cuan with her father Charlie, hosted many of the evenings and created a welcoming space.

I began to prepare some repertoire and ideas, playing newly composed and old tunes, discussing them with the others and the public, and developing my voice. Playing solo each week brought out different impulses. I followed them.

Ahead of the second week, Manchán Mangan passed away and I was shocked because I knew him. At the end of his funeral, the musicians played a planxty by Steve Cooney and I thought that if I played it at Stiúideo Cuan it would be some form of tribute. But there was something else – what was that other impulse? One evening I started to write about Manchán, in Irish, and completed a piece about one of our conversations, on the subject of love. I read it at Stiúideo Cuan and followed it with the planxty. I was between two worlds again.

In my weekly conversations with Diarmuid de Faoite, I realised that this creative multiplicity was something that we shared. Diarmuid is known as a brilliant actor, but he is also a singer, storyteller and dramatist. We began to laugh about our identities: ‘Cé muidne inniu?’ (‘Who are we today?’) we asked. But it wasn’t just us. Mairéad is an exquisite sean-nós singer, but also an actor and she increasingly brought her own poems to the meetings. Máire is a wonderful poet, but also a great storyteller and connector of ideas and happenings and brought these insights to her presentations.

In the eighth week, our evening meeting was going to coincide with the premiere of Aoife Ní Bhriain’s Bóthar na Smaointe. Darach, always seeing a creative possibility, asked us to open the concert with something collaborative. We had noticed a connection in our work that related to the late Gaeltacht organiser, singer and songwriter Pádraig Ó hAoláin – Diarmuid had written a poem about his last meeting with him during the pandemic, when people were only allowed minutes through a window with their dying friends and relatives; I had composed a tune based on Ó hAoláin’s 1970s song ‘Coilín Phádraig Shéamuis’, and Máiréad had the song in her repertoire. Máire reflected on all three pieces and wrote a poem that synthesised the ideas. We decided to perform it all as one work, with no break, the fiddle connecting the two poems and the song. On the night, Diarmuid introduced it by explaining the context of his poem, and he dedicated the piece to everyone who passed away during Covid-19. There was a shift in the room. As we performed the 20-minute piece, we could sense that everyone was thinking about someone they lost, and the feeling charged the performance. I could hear Martina Goggin, who recorded ‘Coilín Phádraig Shéamuis’ with Ó hAoláin in the 1970s, singing harmony in the audience. When I looked up, an audience member had tears in his eyes.

It was the high point of our residency. We had produced something that we could never have planned. We did not know a piece would emerge that would connect with the audience in this way. It was true that in the course of the previous weeks, the pandemic had come up in our conversations: I was playing the tunes of the composer Sandie Purcell and had noticed that she had written many during the pandemic. Diarmuid, Máire and Mairéad too had referenced its impact. But we did not realise that the trauma of the pandemic was humming away underneath our work until it literally appeared on stage with us. When Darach and Éilís connected us with the local community, suddenly it was manifest between us all.

We talk a lot about the arts today, and it is difficult to express how they work. We only know that the mystery of the creative process is at the heart of it all. I don’t fully understand this process. I have struggled with it. But in Stiúideo Cuan, something happened over the ten weeks and on stage that night that deepened my sense of it. And, of course, I had to write it all down, because that’s who I am.