Don’t listen to this man if you want ‘diddly dee’ fiddling...

Rob Adams talks to Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, one of the star attractions at this weekend’s Fiddle 2009 Festival

Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms will be thronged from Friday to Sunday this weekend as fiddle players and listeners alike gather to celebrate the continuing popularity of the instrument and its music in the capital’s annual fiddle festival.

It was at a gathering similar to this that a young musician had his enthusiasm re-fired by a group of players his own age, a re-firing that has led to Caoimhin O Raghallaigh emerging as arguably the most fascinating Irish musician of his generation.

There’s a tendency for those who don’t care for traditional fiddle music – and some who do but with a more ironic inflection – to refer to it as “diddly dee” music.

Making music is like painting sound onto a canvas of time
Caoimhin O Raghallaigh
O Raghallaigh doesn’t do “diddly dee”. He can and loves to play all the traditional tune types with great skill, but his mission goes beyond the tradition.

His belief is that people without any interest or background in traditional music can be drawn into fiddle music and his approach is more that of a poet with sound. There’s a bit of the poet with words in the thirty-year-old Mr O Raghallaigh, too.

“Making music is like painting sound onto a canvas of time,” he says in a quote that, if he hasn’t already done so, he should copyright pronto.

O Raghallaigh was once almost lost to making music. Growing up in Dublin with parents who didn’t play instruments but had spent much of their courtship driving for miles around County Clare to see concertinist Noel Hill and fiddler Tony Linnane and bands like Planxty, the Chieftains and the Bothy Band, he was accustomed to hearing Irish traditional music through the many LPs there were at home. One particular musician, however, captured his imagination.

Hearing a young John Kelly playing The Marino Waltz, a tune composed by The Dubliners’ John Sheahan, on a TV commercial, O Raghallaigh decided that he, too, should play the fiddle.

After much pleading for fiddle lessons, his mother took him to the classes that traditional music advocates Comhaltas ran nearby but, at eight, he was considered too young at the time and was told to come back in two years. The pleading continued, so his mother tried a classical violin teacher.

“I arrived for my first lesson full of enthusiasm, with a manuscript copy of The Marino Waltz in my hand,” says O Raghallaigh. “The teacher was horrified by this piece of music.

“Instead of nurturing my enthusiasm, she turned it to stone in double quick time, I’m afraid. Inspiring she was not. Her final comment to my mother was: ‘You’re wasting your money and my time. He’ll never be a musician’.”

And that might have been that but for his parents, two years later, taking him to a festival in Gormanstown, where he heard a bunch of young fiddlers sounding – he thought – great and having a lot of fun.

Another teacher was found who, this time, opened the door to the world of Irish music, including sessions where the youngster would sit with a group of much older, wiser heads, playing as quietly as possible with his ear to his instrument, trying to fit into the rhythms of jigs, reels, hornpipes, polkas and slides.

In his mid teens O Raghallaigh began to feel, much as he loved playing the fiddle and by this time, the tin whistle and flute too (he later added the uilleann pipes), that the music he was playing was lifeless.

“I realised that nobody was going to teach me how to change that,” he says. “It was up to me to figure it out for myself. So I went in search of music that really excited me. I tried to immerse myself totally in it and try to grasp some fundamental difference between it and the music I was making.”

His quest took him, after leaving school, to a transition year work experience post in the Irish Traditional Music Archives in Dublin where, while working as an archivist, he was able to listen over and over to old recordings, especially of fiddle players from the Sliabh Luachra district on the Cork-Kerry border, County Clare musicians including fiddler Patrick Kelly and piper Willie Clancy, and sean-nos (old style) singers.

All through his student years at Trinity College, where he graduated in theoretical physics, O Raghallaigh continued working in the archives during the holidays and continued to immerse himself in the tradition.

“The thing that really interested me about truly great traditional music was not the notes I heard, but how it made me feel and the state of mind it created in you as a listener,” he says. Not for him, then, the pursuit of speed as a means of making traditional music more exciting.

“Well, if the thing that interests you about traditional music is the notes, then it makes perfect sense that you’d want to play as many of them as possible, as fast as possible,” he says. “But if the thing that interests you is the state of mind created, I think it makes sense to create the kind of music I’m creating now.

“There are many other aspects of the tradition that are integral to the music I make, aspects which many other people have not chosen to keep, such as a particular sense of time and space, an idiosyncratic and internally coherent sense of intonation, and an unsterilised idea of what constitutes acceptable tone.

“I think of music much more in terms of sound than in terms of notes.”

In this he shares an approach with Norwegian fiddler Nils Okland, whose tour earlier this year for the Scottish Arts Council’s Tune-up programme proved a revelation. O Raghallaigh and Okland also share a common instrument, the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, to which O Raghallaigh was introduced while working on a particle accelerator project in America in 2000.

With its wide tonal range and the effect of its sympathetic strings, which allow O Raghallaigh to incorporate the drones of the uilleann pipes into his fiddle playing, the hardanger might have been invented for his new music, albeit music that comes from deep in the tradition.

“Nils and me are not the only ones doing this,” he says. “All over the world, in other folk music traditions, there are people writing really interesting contemporary music which is very obviously directly related to folk music but isn’t necessarily folk music.

“My album Where the One-Eyed Man Is King opened up a whole new listenership. They don’t need a background in traditional music to get it. So I’m trying to communicate to people who might have switched off.”

Caoimhin O Raghallaigh plays at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh on Saturday at 10pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information on Fiddle 2009, log onto www.scotsfiddlefestival.com

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/music-features/don-t-listen-to-this-man-if-you-want-diddly-dee-fiddling-1.931973

Irish Fiddle Regional Styles

An Article from Caoimhín Mac Aoidh on 
Regional Styles in Irish Fiddling

PART I

Approximately 90 years ago the Irish language was spoken without break along the entire southern western and northern coastline and as far inland as County Roscommon (Irish Language Survey of 1891). At this time the Irish of these areas, dialectically speaking, gradually flowed into one another, thus making distinct dialects along a continuous transverse section almost undetectable.

A language can be simply defined as a highly organised series of sounds and it is important to note that music, and in this case traditional Irish dance music, also fits well with this definition.

I feel that both language and music are reflective of their practitioners or creators. Northerners to me generally are straightforward people in their humour and speech. Their music is usually straightforward as well; their song, ornamentally, is also. The Ulster dialect of Irish is often referred to as bland or flat. The music of the more southern counties, as regards their sound, and Irish dialects are significantly lighter in nature. A link between the music and the language is herein implied.

I would like to speculate that prior to the drop-off in the acceptance and playing of traditional music as well as the speaking of the Irish language, dance music, like the language, existed in a continuous gradual blending of styles between areas. These gradations, however, most likely suffered some breaks in the face of insurmountable natural barriers such as the River Shannon and various mountain ranges which limited communication between regions. Postdating the decline in both the acceptance of both traditional dance music and Irish, it was exactly these barriers which helped to maintain the now remote, isolated pockets which held on to their traditions. By the turn of the century the blending of musical styles was defunct, with distinct styles, like Irish dialects, being recognisable only within isolated areas.

To support this idea, one can easily see the River Shannon acting as a natural barrier between County Clare, a musical province where the reel is a heavily emphasised rhythm, and Counties Kerry and Limerick, where a generation ago slides and polkas predominated. (The author acknowledges the presence of turf boats which, at the time in question did somewhat link these areas. It is significant to point out that The Foxhunter's Reel is claimed to be a native tune in both areas with each side claiming transportation to the other district to turf boats). Scattery Island, by all local accounts would have been enigmatic. As this island lies comfortably tucked in a harbour by the mouth of Poulnasherry Bay near Kilrush, it would be thought that the music of the island would be more representative of the Clare area, yet highly credible sources without exception maintain that the music of this island was more like that appreciated on the southern bank of the Shannon. These informants also tell me, however, that the islanders, although forced by geographical division to call themselves Claremen, preferred to consider themselves as separate "islanders". Another excellent example of geographic barriers seperating musical and linguistic provinces are the Bluestack and Sperrin Mountains of Counties Donegal and west Derry which isolate the latter from the flat basalt plain of east County Derry and County Antrim. The mountains of Connemara act similarly separating Connemara from the east County Galway plain.

Rapid mass transportation for the general population in Ireland has become a reality within approximately the last fifteen years. Essentially, what this means, in terms of traditional music, is that prior to the arrival of the motorcar, buses, etc. the country population (musicians included) were restricted to small localised areas. The boundaries of most of these areas were commonly dictated by natural geographic barriers such as rivers, mountains, watersheds, etc. This exposed the musicians within them to a local sphere of influence, thus promoting the continuence of local styles, as outside influences such as travelling musicians still remained minimal. (Some such as Johnny Doran, in recent years however, had a dynamic effect on the local style within certain areas).

As regards the mass media and recordings, I feel it can be truthfully stated that it will be these which deal the killer blow to localised fiddle styles. At present anyone can readily obtain a recording of nearly any type of fiddle style, thus I feel eventually contributing to the rise of homogenous fiddle styles based on heterogenous influences. The late Patrick Kelly of Cree, Co. Clare best summed up the evil side of recordings when he stated that "the worst thing that ever happened to the West Clare style of fiddling was the appearance of Micheal Coleman's records". I needn't go further to illustrate the gargantuan impact which the recordings of the late Sligo fiddle master had on the entire musical population.

I posted part 1 of the promised article on regional styles. In relation to this, I wish to point out that it was written back in the late 1970s and published in the early 1980s (I suspect about 1980), based on a reference to Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh as having been already married. At that time it was the only article published which directly addressed regional styles. Few if any, other than Philippe's, have been published, indicating the dearth of investigative initiatives directed at one of the most interesting and important subjects in the music.

I should point out also that while I still stand over the article, my views have changed a wee bit. I would also write it today with a more tempered view such as substituting a different word for "evil" as appearing in part one. Again, this is an indicator of where things stood then in the 1970s, where the "national" style was booming and there was a virtual intolerance of anything local