Devachan Music - Mark Simos

Composer’s Notes for the
ICCNE Eddie Barron Memorial Commission 2006:
“Rakish Paddy’s Departure”
and
“The Newbuilt Halls of Canton”

Mark Simos — 3 June 2006
www.devachan.com simos@devachan.com

I was honored to be asked to create a piece for the first year of the Irish Cultural Centre of New England’s Eddie Barron Memorial Commission, to be performed at the 2006 Irish Connections Festival. In contemplating a fitting piece, I was struck by the lines of connection between Donegal, where Eddie hailed from originally, and the expansive new grounds of the Irish Cultural Centre in Canton, Massachusetts, which he helped to bring into being. I wanted to create a piece which would serve both as tribute and as a portrayal of the long journey that Irish and Celtic music has taken from its home surroundings to acceptance all over the world, along with the many influences it has both brought to bear and absorbed on that journey.

As I thought of Donegal, I found myself thinking about one of my favorite Irish tunes, an unusual setting of a favorite Irish session tune, “Rakish Paddy,” associated with John Doherty, one of the great Donegal fiddlers and scion of a dynasty of musicians stretching back many generations. Here is what collectors Alan Feldman and Eamonn O’Doherty had to say about John’s music in their collection “The Northern Fiddler” (p.48):

“ .. his playing reveals an aesthetic concern for the purity of melody. Doherty depends on the powerful tone that he can draw out of the fiddle rather than ornamentation to create dramatic effects, and to disclose emotional nuances in a tune. The way in which he describes his father’s playing is applicable to his own — ‘He could strike great power into it.” He may have cultivated his powerful tone in response to playing out doors at fairs and in crowded kitchens, noisy with the clatter of dancing feet. At the same time there is an aesthetic element involved in his use of tone, for he constantly uses his skill to reveal and deepen the beauty of the melodic structure of a tune. When he plays, the tunes sound old. You feel as if you are hearing the tune as it must have sounded when first composed, as it was played centuries ago without adulterations and modifications. John will often mention that fact to the sympathetic listener himself. The effect of his style of playing is to surround a tune with a lonely remote quality that is distinct from the rollicking, earthy playing of most other Donegal fiddlers; he forces the listener to contemplate the mystery that lies hidden in each tune. He will often look curiously at his fiddle and pat it, informing the listener that there are more things in this instrument than man can know. He regards the fiddle as a transcendent object and is fond of telling humorous stories of its magical powers.”

I work in Celtic and related musical traditions in a variety of modes: as songwriter, player and teacher of traditional music, and tunesmith; as well as in larger compositions and in collaborations with choreographers such as the new group UnBeaten Path. In all this work I am following the tributaries of a single big river of an idea: extending forms and structures of traditional music in ways integral and intrinsic to the music, not imported from outside. I seek to reveal the mystery and grandeur of the older music more clearly to contemporary ears, and to make directly audible in the structure of the work processes of composition and variation which typically occur in musicians’ minds and imaginations. With this intent, I decided to create a sort of fantasia or theme-and-variations on “Rakish Paddy,” exploring musical figures of the tune in a more extended musical journey.

There are many compositional challenges in stretching traditional forms onto a broader temporal canvas. Fiddle tunes are remarkably compact bit of composition within their short (usually 32) measures of music—barely time for an eye-blink or a nose-scratch in the wider temporal canvas of the “serious” composer. Whereas often in classical music (especially in the older Baroque style) a single theme or motive is woven into an extended piece or (aptly named) “invention,” a fiddle tune unfolds in a dense mosaic of braided motives, themes, symmetries and parallels to the ear of the musician or the informed listener. My approach for this piece was to start with Doherty’s elegant setting of “Rakish Paddy” and “explode” it outward, developing each of the tune’s fleetingly occurring figures or motives in turn. As the focus of this development was on melody, I decided to build the piece around the cello, which has lately been revived and revitalized as an increasingly important instrument in contemporary Celtic, old-time and bluegrass music. The result is a solo cello piece entitled “Rakish Paddy’s Departure.”

The piece begins with the traditional tune stated on fiddles and cello, to set the shape of the tune in the listeners’ ears. Then the fun begins! At first we hear the traditional tune being “mulled over” by the cello, broken down into its melodic “notions” and built back up again, almost as a fiddler might “noodle” playing alone on the porch. Then follows a series of miniature “inventions” based on motives of the fiddle tune, ranging from very “fiddlistic” treatments to more wide-ranging stylistic explorations.

It was my expectation that, exploring the tune in this way, I would find my way to a new tune of some sort, some transformation of “Rakish Paddy.” Such transformations—reels to jigs, or reels to flings as is more common in Donegal, slow airs and song tunes to dance tunes, shifts of mode and so forth—are much more the true life of a tradition than apparently static pieces of repertoire, which are always ideas in flux. I wasn’t sure where I’d get to, just as those that have left Ireland and other familiar homelands over the centuries have never been sure what they would find at journey’s end. In this instance, what emerged surprised me: a new tune that seemingly came out of nowhere, tugging at my sleeve saying, “Daddy, daddy! Write me down!” In a remote sense this new tune can be heard as a transmogrification of the 2nd strain of “Rakish Paddy” (a strain which itself has generated many variation parts in other traditional versions of the tune). Mostly it is just a new tune that comes from where they all come from. It uses compound meters typical of Balkan music (music which has had a strong influence on contemporary Irish traditional music), but with melodies more Celtic in flavor. It is also truly a “fiddle tune for the cello,” not merely a fiddle tune (for violin) accompanied on cello or transposed down to the cello. Although I consider it a fiddle tune, it unfolds in a succession of parts more intricate than a fiddle tune’s typical AABB structure. I have the sense in the tune of something large, formidable and weighty being raised up by an act of sheer will and determination, much like the buildings and grounds of the Irish Cultural Centre itself. Thus I have entitled the tune “The Newbuilt Halls of Canton.”

Performing the piece is talented young cellist Ariel Friedman, a performance major studying at Northwestern University under Hans Jorgen Jensen. Ariel is a recent arrival on the Celtic scene, featured on Hanneke Cassel’s latest CD Silver, and performing with her own band Lady and the Pants; she will be an instructor this summer at the Boston Harbor Scottish Fiddle School. Helping to kick us off is Amanda Cavanaugh, a young up-and-coming fiddler in Boston’s thriving Celtic music scene, and member of the fiddle band Five AM. Amanda studied with renowned fiddler Tommy Peoples, originally from Donegal himself, who taught her his own striking version of Doherty’s “Rakish Paddy.” The version we play blends John Doherty’s, Tommy Peoples’, and my own. Enjoy!