Author Archives: Admin

The Thin Green Line: On Writing About Irish Traditional Music

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Musicians need to harness the printed word to affect their fortunes. – See more at: http://journalofmusic.com/focus/thin-green-line-writing-about-irish-traditional-music#sthash.EWgbkwp7.dpuf

Published in The Journal of Music on 27 June 2014.

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Musicians need to harness the printed word to affect their fortunes.

The reason I have spent the last fourteen years writing and publishing about music is because of a simple principle that I happen to believe: that the writing about a music affects the fortunes of a music.

Every genre of music produces a body of literature, from the specialised to the general, and the quality and range of that writing will Continue reading →

The Splintering: Towards a future of micro music communities

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Every morning during our summer holidays as children in An Cheathrú Rua, each of us had a job to do. My responsibility was tidying the sitting room. In general, it involved fixing cushions on the couch, clearing ash and the odd beer can out of the fire, emptying the ashtray, Continue reading →

The Search for Recognition

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His voice snapped at the air around him as he presented his idea: ‘It would be like water or electricity, a utility that you pay for.’ The radio voice was talking about streaming. ‘Music would always be available to you, accessible to you, all around you.’

I thought of the hundreds of upcoming concerts that I see listed on The Journal of Music, about the musical riches that are available to us, about how things are undervalued. Music is all around us, but until we get the bill for it, do we notice?

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Who Would Choose the Creative Life?

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One of the particularly interesting parts of Singing from the Floor, a fascinating new history of British folk clubs by J.P. Bean, is a chapter that contains interviews with the children of the singers, musicians, audiences and organisers who generated the heyday of the clubs in the 1960s and 70s.

Their children, people such as Eliza Carthy, Nancy Kerr and Seth, Sean and Sam Lakeman, remember sitting at folk clubs when they were children, usually with a lemonade and crisps, and describe their learning process as ‘organic’ and ‘by osmosis’. As soon as they were old enough, they were involved in performance themselves.

What jumps out, however, is not just how culturally rich their childhood was, but how their parents also created a creative economy for those Continue reading →

Where Noel Hill Meets Jennifer Walshe

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I tend to take pictures quickly at concerts – I’m concerned that I may miss something, and I also feel a little self-conscious – so they generally don’t turn out well. Such was the case at the Session with the Pipers concert in the Cobblestone at the beginning of March. The concertina player Noel Hill’s performance was exceptional; I knew I wanted to capture it; I took a hurried snap. Such dark, grainy, blurred mobile phone pictures are becoming my personal diary of the music I hear.

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The Journey of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh

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In the summer of 2007, fiddle-player Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh didn’t bring his new album to the Willie Clancy Summer School:

I haven’t put Where the One-Eyed Man is King in shops. I didn’t bring it down to the Willie Clancy week. I don’t think people in traditional music here would be interested in it. It’s only for sale at certain gigs and on the internet. I wouldn’t even sell it at certain gigs because I know if you sell it to somebody from a really traditional background they are not going to be interested. They are going to say, what the hell is this?

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All to Play For: A Challenge for Music and Musicians

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It’s light, tentative and short, but I listen closely to every word. I’m talking about the moment at the end of a concert, when a member of the audience approaches you. The conversation is about making a connection beyond the stage rather than discussing anything in detail, but that immediate period post-concert is a raw moment for a performer; even a few words can stay with you.

‘You know, my daughter used to play violin, I wish she had kept it up. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to do. I sent her because I Continue reading →

Music and the Betrayal of Ireland

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On BBC Radio 3’s CD Review, it seems that the greatest compliment a reviewer can give a conductor is that a passage is ‘beautifully understated’. I was reminded of this a couple of months ago when the conductor David Brophy appeared on RTÉ Radio 1. He was leaving his role with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra after seven years and was asked to pick out three highlights. Alongside concerts with Lang Lang and Jon Lord, he picked the premiere of Dave Flynn’s Concerto for Traditional Irish Musician, Aontacht, performed by Martin Hayes.

‘It had more of a punch to it…. Only a few days before… the IMF arrived into Dublin…  as a nation we were all feeling quite low.’

Beautifully understated.

The concert took place on 24 November 2010. Six days before, the International Monetary Fund had arrived to negotiate the country’s bailout. Two winters before, Continue reading →

A Connection Like a Full Moon

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Is increased audience participation the great musical trend of our time?

In Backnang, southern Germany, a concert reaches for the finish line. We settle on a simple, short hornpipe as an encore, something unrehearsed. The audience perceives a shift. Convention slips away. They feel for the pulse in the piece and start to clap along, their stamping travels under us. It feels like a release. The room is one, a connection like a full moon. They shift from being spectator to creator, the music carrying the expression of over one hundred rather than two. ‘They’ve been waiting to do that all night,’ another musician says afterwards.

Three months on, it is a memorable moment – audience participation doesn’t always work, but when music manages to balance itself on a wave of communal energy, it is a powerful thing.

For much of human history, we were all participators in music. With no recordings or easy access to professional performances, music was more Continue reading →

How Can We Connect to the Musical Life Around Us?

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For a little more than a year, my colleagues and I in The Journal of Music have been involved in an online experiment. In November of 2012, we launched a listings service, but not a standard music listings service with just concerts. We aspired to create a system that was flexible enough to accommodate a broader range of musical activity, that would, for example, attract every type of musical format and all sizes  too, from the informal community workshop to the big annual festival.

My personal motivation was an interest in the diversity of the musical life around us, how the digital world can make us more aware of it, and what will happen once we, as musicians and audiences, become more fully aware of the range of musical opportunities that are all around us all the time.

This interest goes back to the original print magazine, JMI: The Journal of Music in Ireland, which I founded in 2000. It combined writing on traditional, folk, classical, jazz, contemporary classical music and more, partly because I was trying to challenge the traditional hierarchy of genres – with classical music at the top and folk at the bottom – but also because I was trying to present a more accurate picture of the musical life around us.

It was an idea that connected well with the emerging digital world. Very soon, iTunes, MySpace and YouTube had all but demolished the notion of a hierarchy of genres – in the digital world anyway. Similarly, The Journal of Music listings service took an open approach, in that all events would be on an equal level, without categorisation by genre or scale.

An island of plenty

To date, there have been almost 3,000 listings uploaded. What was striking from the start was the number of events taking place. Ireland is known for having a lively and intense musical life (perhaps because of its size and the fact that it is an island), but we could not conceive of just how busy it is.

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