Anam Cara

IRELAND HAS A GREAT STORE OF TRADITIONAL MUSIC AND THERE is a great diversity of style and nuance. Each region has a distinctive tradition. One can hear the contours of the landscape shape the tonality and spirit of the music. The memory of the people is echoed in the music. Traditional Irish music is joyous and lively. The reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas and slides have tremendous energy and passion. In the ‘slow airs’ the wistfulness of loss and sorrow is piercing. When one considers the history of suffering which the Irish have endured through colonization, famine and emigration, it is fascinating that our music has such heart. Indeed some of the greatest and most distinctive Irish music developed among Irish emigrants, especially in America, and must have been one of their few shelters in exile. Arriving in a strange land and having to work hard, far away from their family, friends and home landscapes, music must have opened secret doors in the memory and allowed the heart to come home again. When they felt lost and forsaken, they rejoiced in this universal language that crosses all frontiers and barriers. The music of a people offers a unique entry to their unconscious life. The tenor of what haunts and delights them becomes audible there. The cry of a people is in their music. The mystery of music is its uncanny ability to coax harmony out of contradiction and chaos. Often the beauty of great music is a beauty born from the rasp of chaos. The confidence of creativity knows that deep conflict often yields the most interesting harmony and order.

In the Irish tradition we have sean-nós singing. This is a style of unaccompanied singing in the Irish language which has a primal tonality and very beautiful rhythm. The resonance and style of sean-nós seems to mirror the landscape and sensibility of the people. There is a special repertoire of these songs and they are sung over and over. Each sean-nós singer has a unique but easily recognizable style. The song comes alive in a new way as it is etched in the singer’s voice; the cut and style of the phrasing determines everything. The sounds of the Irish soul cannot be expressed in the same way in English.

B

ELONGING TO

M

USIC

Music is a science of love relating to harmony and rhythm.

PLATO

MUSIC BRINGS GREAT BEAUTY INTO OUR LIVES. IN THE WAY THAT IT arrives, lingers and vanishes, it offers us a clue to the eternal nature of beauty. Like music, beauty dwells in some invisible realm adjacent to us, yet it never becomes our possession. But when it emerges to visit us, it wafts us away to a realm where desolation and gravity no longer preside. Though we may indeed be wounded by beauty at times, like the darkness of music, it can be a sweet pain.

When you really listen to music, you become detached from the world; indeed you enter another world. Within the shelter of music, other things become possible for you, things that you could never feel or know in your day to day world. Sound can create a world as real as that of the clock, the field or the street. You breathe and dwell within that soundscape as though it were a world specially created to mirror and echo the deepest longings of your life. There is profound belonging in music which at certain times in your life can embrace and reach you more deeply than friend or lover. It is as though the music instinctively knows where you dwell and what you need.

Music does not touch merely the mind and the senses; it engages that ancient and primal presence we call soul. The soul is never fully at home in the social world that we inhabit. It is too large for our contained, managed lives. Indeed, it is surprising that the soul seems to accommodate us and permit us to continue within the fixed and linear identities we have built for ourselves. Perhaps in our times of confusion and forsakenness the soul is asserting itself, endeavouring to draw us aside in order to speak to our hearts. Upheavals in life are often times when the soul has become too smothered; it needs to push through the layers of surface under which it is buried. In essence, the soul is the force of remembrance within us. It reminds us that we are children of the eternal and that our time on earth is meant to be a pilgrimage of growth and creativity. This is what music does. It evokes a world where that ancient beauty can resonate within us again. The eternal echoing of music reclaims us for a while for our true longing.

T

HE

D

ARK

B

EAUTY OF

E

ROS IN

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE