Irish Jesuit Province

Music in IrelandAuthor(s): Emily HughesSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 69, No. 820 (Oct., 1941), pp. 467-470Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20514935 .

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Music in Ireland

By EMILY HUGHES.

IT is a sad fact that there is only a handful of composers in Ireland to-day, counting the good with the not-so-good.

Annual competitions for original compositions, held by feiseanna and similar institutions, attract few entries. Competi tions, in the sam-e feiseanna, for playing and singing the music of others, are thickly crowded. It is a common thing for seventy or eighty competitors to enter some of the piano contests, for instance, and one can only pity the pallid and exhausted adjudi cator as he tries to formulate a judicious little speech after the ordeal of listening seventy or eighty times to the same two pieces.

All this musical skill and taste seem to be going to waste, since none, or very few, of the young players have any intention or ambition to become musicians in the larger, composer's, sense of the word. A silver cup on the sideboard or a few letters after their names, which permit them in turn to teach and train pupils for future contests, seem to be the sum of their desires as far as a musical profession is concerned.

The nurseries of young musicians, outside the/academies, are those secondary schools in which Music-is taken as a subject in the Intermediate or Leaving Certificate examinations. These examinations entail a certain knowledge of Harmony and Counterpoint, and are the starting point of an interest in music from the administrative, as opposed to the executive, angle. To produce symphonies instead of practising sonatas, to conduct operas instead of singing solos, these are the visions of the neophyte on first making 'the acquaintance of Harmony and Counterpoint, the wide, beautiful vistas that open up in front

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468 THE IRISH MONTHLY t

of the mind's eye. The vistas close abruptly as the subject grows more and more complicated, and the visions become lost in a forest of blue-pencilled mistakes in the young composer's exer cise book.

It is a national failing to be too easily discouraged from holding a good opinion of one's own abilities, and in a subject so personal, so impractical as music, the beginner is wont to shrink back into his shell at arbitrary criticism. This tune, that pro gression, the other cadence, may sound beautiful to his uneducated ear, but they do not obey the rules, and must be struck out. Substituted notes which are perfectly correct do not seem half as fine to him, mourning for his lost idea. He (or she) is sixteen years old; or eighteen, if a candidate for the Leaving

Certificate examination. A heavy programme of examination subjects that must be passed, many of them more difficult still than Music, and entailing even more drudgery, thoughts of the futuire and the necessity of earning a living, and the complete lack of comprehension that unmusical people show for the intricacies of his problems, swamp him.

He knows that Mozart was a child prodigy, that Bach had copied (at ten) all the finest organ music of his day, and that Beethoven

was deputising for the court organist at the age of twelve. He feels t-hat h& has startedctqo late, too old at sixteen. He does not learn until long afterwards, when he has smothered every tendency- to adopt the profession of music, that Mozart was fre quently guilty of those shocking things, consecutives, and that Haydn's first quartet was frowned upon for its contrapuntal errors; -and then, too, he realises that many a first-class academi cian who never perpetrated a contrapuntal error in his life arrived nowhere, nevertheless.

Thus the music in his mind is never heard elsewhere. The

symphonies remain unwritten, the operas unsung, and real

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MUSIC IN IRELAND 469

genius may be repressed-all, it seems, through an over-pedantic attitude to cut-and-dried rules. If those rules could be temporarily forgotten, and if encouragement instead of criticism

was made the order of the day in places where composition is studied, the music of Ireland would become something more vital than a handful of concert ballads and some " arrangements ". People with music in their minds might not feel so diffident about putting that music down on paper if they were not afraid that it would be pounced upon by academicians. Benevolent experts could show them how to call Harmony and Counterpoint to their assistance, instead of dreading them as a kind of two-edged avenger's sword hanging over their heads. There might be published by some enterprising printer a periodical sheet of this handyman music-music being no harder or more expensive to print than other matter-or it might even be played on the radio at intervals. Possibly some new musical form would emerge from such a general revival of interest in making music; it might

be good or bad, but at least it would be original and native.

Academicians who argue that classical music began with

Palestrina overlook the fact that the world had music which satis fied it completely for thousands of years before he was born. Per

haps it is with that older music that native Irish music (if it could

be written) would show an affinity. Perhaps it was the rise of

those twin bogies, Harmony and Counterpoint, that frightened Irish music away into a memory of a hundred-years-gone

Harpers' Convention and the lingering, trembling tunes of

Bunting's Collection. It is well to collect the traditional airs of the country, and to

revive an interest in ballad-singing. It is an interesting and patriotic pursuit, of value to history and folklore. But let them gather every traditional air in the country, analyse it, ticket it, and catalogue it, and what have they got? A museum. Music

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470 THE -IRISH MONTHLY

has not benefited by their labours. Music, to stay alive, must be composed new and fresh every day of the year in large quanti ties. Ballad-makers have conservative minds, and use only a handful of tu~nes to fit the words of dozens of ballads; and eveIn these are not original. There is a great danger of praising old airs simply because they are old and familiar, and remind one of one's childhood days-these are reasons for love, not admiration. Admiration and praise should be reserved, for the makers of new tunes who have the courage to publish them.

Music without words is the field for development. Airs for the violin, chords for the piano, calls for the bugle, rhythms for the drum-the kind of extempore inspirations that come to hun dreds of musicians and drift away again because it does not seem worth one's while writing them down-these are the nucleus of a growth of Irish music. People have simple tastes on the whole, and are easily pleased. The potential scorn of a few academicians should not be permitted to bottle up all the innate music of which we are told our race is capable. The lieggars' Opera is merely a hotch-potch of simple tunes with a strumming accom paniment which anyone who plays " by ear "could easily invent; yet we are told that " it made Gay rich, and Rich gay ", and it is still profitably revived at intervals. ThereAsould be a dozen Irish operas at least as good as that, or better. Musical societies and orchestras should be able to make up their own operas. It would only require courage, a large, operatic idea, and a bland disregard of possible criticism.

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