A tribute to the great uilleann piper who died on 14 March 2018.

One of the great Irish traditional musicians of our time has passed away. Liam O’Flynn, aged 72, died yesterday (14 March) after a battle with illness over the last year.

So much that we take for granted today can be traced back to the impact that his uilleann piping had in the 1970s and after.
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The debate around RTÉ’s orchestras points to deeper challenges – it’s essential that we keep this conversation going, writes Toner Quinn.

The Galway Jazz Festival is on an ambitious new path – with over 40 events over 4 days held in October. Toner Quinn attended three sold-out shows at the Mick Lally Theatre.

Galway Jazz Festival began in 2005, but had slimmed down one to just one day of events by 2015. In 2017, a new team were determined to put it back on the path towards growth. Matthew Berrill (Artistic Director), Ellen Cranitch (Director) and Ciarán Ryan (General Manager) programmed more than forty events over four days (5–8 October), and set about a serious publicity campaign that created a real sense of anticipation. By the time the event was officially launched on 6 October by Carl Corcoran, Ryan could say from the mic, with real excitement, that people ‘were buying tickets like never before’.

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What makes a political folk opera work? Do traditional musicians go far enough in their experimentations? And what is the ‘social side’ of classical music? Toner Quinn reflects on a range of questions raised by the musical riches at this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival.

I’m picking up fragments of a conversation at the next table in Kilkenny’s Marble City Bar. It’s initially good humoured but then starts to heat up. ‘The EU is a German project, not a European project!… What Ireland should do is… What we need is… no, no, no… listen, that won’t happen…”. The accents are Irish, British, Eastern European. Nothing special about a chat like that in Ireland these days? If you were at Kilkenny Arts Festival this year, it certainly felt different.

The previous night I had attended Counting Sheep, a folk opera by musicians Mark and Marichka Marczyk and featuring the Lemon Bucket Orkestra. There was something about the way Festival Director Eugene Downes spoke about it as he introduced a different concert on the Monday night that compelled me to go. ‘It’s about freedom,’ he said, pausing, still obviously dwelling on the performance he’d seen that night.

Immersive
There are two ways of attending Counting Sheep, ’viewing’ and ‘immersive’. Immersive enter first. Marichka sits at the piano playing accompaniment to Mark Marczyk’s fiddle. We sit at, or around, a table (the viewing audience are seated further back) and a cast of perhaps ten begin to serve food and drink – bread, broth and bright-coloured drinks. Moments later, the Ukrainian special police – the Berkut – will appear and forcefully charge down the table. The audience scatter. What was festive turns into horror – with the audience at the centre. Continue reading →

Daring performances in ‘The Second Violinist’, a new opera by Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh premiered at the Galway International Arts Festival, explore a range of personal and musical crises, writes Toner Quinn.

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The suicide bombing at Manchester Arena was the second such attack at a music event in two years. What is to be the role of music in this ‘age of anger’, asks Toner Quinn.

I was going to surprise my daughter the next morning with some chat about Ariana Grande.

It was Monday night around 11.25pm. Winding down, I was watching a Hozier song cover and scrolling through the comments. Someone pointed to another of his covers, of Ariana Grande’s ‘Problem’.

Ariana Grande, a name I hear often. A star that compels my daughter to sit as near as possible to the TV whenever she’s on. I would listen to the cover and tell my nine-year-old about it. As I switched between Hozier, Grande singing ‘Problem’ and other YouTube suggestions, suddenly a New York Times alert flashed up in the corner of my screen: ‘Ariana Grande… bombing… Manchester.’ I thought my tired eyes had mixed up the lines on my computer screen. But no.
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Concertina player Cormac Begley’s creative journey has been one to watch, and his new solo album is an assertive next step, writes Toner Quinn.

With so much commentary on traditional music giving the impression of homogeneity – a music that carries heritage, ancestry, regional styles and community values in one go – it is worth emphasising that all creative journeys in this genre are actually unique. Where musicians end up may be reminiscent of one or other artist; how they got there is not.

Concertina player Cormac Begley’s creative journey has been one to watch. As a student of psychology in Galway in 2008 he founded the concert series Tunes in the Church. In 2015, he established Airt, a residential school for musicians and artists in his family home of West Kerry.  Continue reading →

Liam O’Connor’s first solo album strikes the balance between virtuosity and style, writes Toner Quinn.

The 1960s and 1970s were breakthrough decades for Irish traditional music, triggering a climb in popularity that continued right up to the 1990s.

In terms of fiddle playing, the ‘post-peak’ generation that rose to prominence after the 1990s, in an even more diverse environment, have continued to produce original approaches. Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Zoë Conway, Ciarán Ó Maonaigh, Breda Keville, Malachy Bourke and Liam O’Connor – all of whom would have been born within a decade of each other – illustrate the diversity of fiddle styles today. If Bourke and Keville work on a compact area of musical ground; and Ó Raghallaigh and Conway are innovators; then Ó Maonaigh and O’Connor lie between, drawing in wider influences but always second to intense solo and duet playing. Continue reading →

Johnny Óg Connolly’s new song cycle for Liam Ó Maonlaí captured a range of atmospheres, from mystery to melancholy, writes Toner Quinn.

It’s never enough of course, but the Arts Council’s Deis scheme continues to fuel interesting projects that are opening up new possibilities in traditional music, from the successful launch of the inaugural Achill International Harp Festival last October to the live recording of This is How We Fly’s second album in January, and many more projects before and after. 

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Michael Dervan’s new book, ‘The Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland 1916–2016’, is, like the Composing the Island festival last September, an attempt at addressing the ‘invisibility of composers in Irish life’ – but not all composers, writes Toner Quinn.

For a time as a teenager all I wanted to be was a composer. I sought out biographies of the greats, from Bach to Ravel, read manuals on orchestration, entered competitions. Then my performance side developed more and it took a back seat, but my abiding interest in the craft of composition stems from those days.

My early idea of a composer reflected my music education – the classic, pyramid type: classical music at the top and folk music at the bottom, starting with plainchant and working its way through fugue, sonata form, Sturm und Drang, serialism, and all the other agreed signposts. Once I learned more about traditional music, classical music, popular music and the wider contemporary music world, that pyramid dissolved into a world with not so much a clear structure, but rather a sparkling criss-crossing world of personal and community expression that could be understood in much more open ways. Continue reading →