Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin

1 Mar 2005 in Music

At the Musical Interface

Irish pianist and composer MÍCHEÁL Ó SÚILLEABHÁIN talks to the Arts Journal about his a tour of the Highlands and Islands and his passion for bringing together traditional and classical music.

Arts Journal: Mícheál, tell us first how the tour in March with a string quartet came about?

Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin: About a year and a half ago I got an invitation from Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic College on Skye. I have had increasing connections with them the past few years, and very happy connections, too. Mary McAleese was giving the annual UHI lecture there, and they asked me to perform. Talking with them about it, we knew it would be very costly to involve a string orchestra. I had been working a little bit in Ireland with a string quartet, using scaled down arrangements, and I proposed that we do that. They approached the Scottish Ensemble, and they put together a quartet for the occasion. We got on famously right away, and I was able to put together the music very quickly, and was very pleased with the way that the intimate sound of the quartet worked with the traditional musicians.

AJ: How did the current tour grow from that?

MO: That formula was then taken up by the Scottish Ensemble, and they applied for funding from the Scottish Arts Council [via the Tune Up programme] for a Highlands and Island tour. Iomart Cholm Cille [Columba Initiative] in Ireland helped as well, and that is how came together. I’m really looking forward to it, and I’ve started talking to some people about bringing it over to the Irish Gaelic areas as well, so I’m hoping that may happen.

AJ: You did the show at Celtic Connections as a prelude to the tour [see review] – how did it differ from the original one in Skye?

MO: In the case of Skye it was quite a short version, so the first time we did the longer show was at Celtic Connections in Glasgow in January. What will normally happen is that I will come out and play some solo piano, then I’ll be joined by Niall Keegan (flute) and Sandra Joyce (bodhrán and voice). In the second half we’ll be joined by the string quartet for the rest of the concert.

AJ: Is there anything different for the tour?

MO: In each venue we will also have a Scottish Gaelic poet or reader to introduce an element of the language into the thing.

AJ: How did you choose the music for the collaboration with the string quartet?

MO: There is a block of music I have written that interfaces traditional and classical musicians, and there are really two kinds of pieces within that. Some of them are longer pieces like Oileán/Island that would take a lot of preparation and rehearsal and are quite large scale, and then there are a number of what you might call more popular pieces for people who do know my music, pieces like Between Worlds and Woodbrook and Letting Go and so on. The logical thing was to pick a selection of those pieces and string them together.

AJ: Was there no possibility of a commission for new music for this project?

MO: No, that wasn’t really the idea behind it, although I do have one or two new arrangements of older pieces that I’m just finishing now, so there are some new elements. Writing new stuff is a big commitment, and it is also a separate issue from rehearsing, performing and touring, I think. However, Colin Hynd [the director of Celtic Connections] and I have opened up the possibility of some new music for Celtic Connections this time next year, and that is something that I would be very interested in doing if it were possible.

AJ: Did you grow up in a traditional music environment?

MO: No. In my teens in the 1960s I played in rock groups in Clonmel in County Tipperary, where I was born, and like a lot of kids, I also had piano lessons, which meant classical music. They were the two streams, and quite separate ones. I discovered traditional music when I was 17 or 18 and I came down to the University of Cork to study music. The great composer Sean O Riada was in the department here, and he switched me into traditional music, because in the 1960s in Ireland, if you were a townie or a city boy, traditional music was hick. It was rural and outmoded and boring. O Riada broke down a lot of pre-conceptions about the music which people of my generation held. After that, I did a bit of whistling and piping and fiddling and flute playing, but my instrument is the keyboard, and I really felt this was my instrument.

AJ: There was no real tradition of keyboard playing in Irish traditional music, was there?

MO: From the early 1970s I was quite conscious of the fact that instead of just trying to play all these traditional tunes I now had in my head, I was beginning to try to evolve some kind of style of Irish piano playing. When I read about things like the development of, say, ragtime piano in America, I can see an analogous process at work. There are all the attendant technical problems with any new instrument coming into a tradition, like how do you make it sound right, and develop certain ornaments, and so on.

AJ: Was it a matter of developing a role for the piano within existing structures, or more akin to a new idiom?

MO: I found myself practising with my left hand in my pocket, because I knew that unless I could make it sound right just in the treble notes, without the rhythmic accompaniments, I would always be off-centre. Making it work with one hand means that you bring the piano into the structures of the music, but when you then bring in the left hand, then you are admitting that this is a piano you are playing, not a concertina, and you begin to interact with the history of the instrument itself, and that is when you start to make something new. You have to work with the tension of the music itself, and the tension of the instrument, which is not in line with that tradition, and a new sound can be worked out between these tensions, drawing on classical and pop and traditional and jazz.

AJ: How do you see your method of combining traditional and classical music?

MO: Many people will say they are different traditions, leave them alone, but I have these musics inside me, and don’t want to keep them all separate. The way I express that is through my fingers on the piano keyboard, and when I use a classical orchestra, that has really been a case of bringing them in on my fingers as well. It hasn’t been a case of sitting back in an ivory tower and composing – I have scored the classical strings in relation to what I am already doing on the piano, then brought the traditional musicians in, almost as if the traditional musicians are in on my left hand and the classical on my right hand, and the piano is holding the whole thing together.

AJ: What drives that interest?

MO: I think it has something to do with bringing together the rational and the intuitive. Classical music is very rational, and gets written about and theorised endlessly, whereas traditional music tends to elude these kinds of theories, and people settle in the end for just playing it, with no elaborate theory behind it. It’s a music you do, and it is even hard to teach in that sense, because you pick it up from people who do it.

AJ: Do you see it in terms of a fusion?

MO: I don’t really like the word fusion, because the problem is that you can end up with the worst of both, or just the middle ground of both. I try to find a balance between the two. The word I often use comes from computer language, and that is interfacing. I think that is what is actually happening in the music. Pieces of mine like Oileán/Island or Casadh/Turning or Gaiseadh/Flowing have a diagonal in the title, and in a way the whole thing is about the diagonal stroke, the space between two languages and two kinds of music. I am also very conscious when doing a concert in Scotland of the connections through the Celtic past as well as the present, and of the importance of Scottish music.

AJ: You are very involved in higher education as well, first at Cork and then at the University of Limerick, where you set up the Irish World Music Centre for research. What is happening there now?

MO: We have just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Irish World Music Centre by announcing a new project called the Irish World Performing Arts Village, which is a 17 million Euro project and will be the new home of the Centre on the campus at Limerick. We have grown from nothing to a department that runs nine MA programmes, one BA programme, we have a staff of about 16 full time workers and dozens of part time tutors coming in and out, and about 200 students from about 20 different countries, and that is growing rapidly. I’m very committed to my work at Limerick.

Tour dates are:

Columba Centre, Islay, Saturday 5 March 2005
Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, Monday 7 March 2005
Macphail Centre, Ullapool, Tuesday 8 March 2005
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Skye, Wednesday 9 March 2005
An Tobar, Tobermory, Mull, Thursday 10 March 2005
Àrainn Shuaineirt, Strontian, Friday 11 March 2005
Festival Theatre, Pitlochry, Saturday 12 March 2005