When we started this festival seven years ago, my belief was that a sufficient audience with interest in the most authentic form of Irish music must surely exist; that the music itself does not have to be shaped and bent to meet the perceived needs of an audience. In its purest form it speaks a universal language. I have sat through almost all of the performances each year of this festival and every time I leave Bantry, I do so with a renewed faith in the strength of this music.
In bringing Irish music under the umbrella of an organization like West Cork Music, with its accomplishments in presenting chamber music, we benefit from the ethos the organization has so skillfully and tastefully created, enabling us all to focus on the details and nuances of traditional music. Within this subtle setting we have experienced performances each year in which musicians and singers have exceeded the challenge of performing in an intimate acoustic environment with minimal stagecraft. Our music reveals sophistication and artfulness and its inherent virtuosity of thought.
Irish music is a melodic based music with only the necessary amount of complexity to convey its musical message. The aesthetic quality of the music suggests naturalness and unselfconsciousness and a desire for feeling that supercedes the need for technical polish. The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi values the timeworn over the new, personal over the impersonal and natural imperfection over mechanical perfection. These thoughts can be applied as easily to Irish traditional music and might serve as a listening guidepost to this year’s concerts.
In one of the earliest accounts of Irish music, Gerald of Wales, who visited Ireland in 1146 A.D made some unfriendly observations about the Irish people. In the case of Irish musicians, however, his comments were more favorable and could as easily be made today:
“It is only in the case of musical instruments, that I find any commendable diligence in the people…They seem to be incomparably more skilled in these than any other people I have seen…They glide so subtly from one mode to another and the grace notes so freely sport with such abandon and bewitching charm around the steady tone of the heavier sound, that the perfection of their art seems to lie in their concealing it as if it were the better for being hidden… An art revealed brings shame.”
Although the music of this period would likely have sounded different than its present day counterpart, the virtue of art concealed has remained a constant. It is not unreasonable to assume that what we will hear in this year’s festival carries some common strands from that first observation.
But perhaps we should give the final word to the classical composer Bela Bartok who recognized the beauty in folk melody with the following remarks:
“Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means."
Martin Hayes
