Rather than play the old favourites, Shaun Davey prefers to write traditional music with a classical twist, writes Siobhán Long
Even the wiliest of traditional musicians would be hard pressed to learn a fraction of the tunes from the canon. It's a landscape teeming with jigs, reels, hornpipes and slow airs, so it's no surprise that the majority of players are content to navigate its intricate terrain without ever contemplating the possibility of adding further to the melee with a new tune or two.
Shaun Davey is a composer who's relished the challenge that writing for the tradition brings with it. In particular, he's thrived at that curious interface (some might suggest it's a yawning crevasse) where traditional and classical music intersect.
Piper Liam Ó Floinn is a musician who has taken the chance to step into the unknown in Davey's company, the pair having forged new ground with spectacular success with The Brendan Voyage and Granuaile.
"Shaun has always been drawn to the uilleann pipes," Ó Floinn remarks. "It's such a colourful, expressive instrument, and for a composer, that unique voice must be inspiring. Even though I had a whole tradition at my back, I had all the tunes in the world, I jumped at the chance to work with him. Shaun's idea was to use the uilleann pipes to represent St Brendan's little leather-skin boat, and the great forces of the orchestra to represent the great forces of nature that the boat encountered. It was such a wonderful idea."
Big Tunes And Anthems is the title of a forthcoming concert celebrating the oeuvre of the Belfast-born Davey. The night will include west Kerry box player and singer, Seamus Begley, among its performers. Begley was also part of the ensemble which performed at the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics, and he makes no secret of his appetite for tackling Davey's newly-composed songs and tunes, despite his stated inability to learn more than a handful of traditional songs each year.
"It's always exciting, learning a new tune," Begley declares. "The new tune, like the new tractor, is always the popular one. I cannot play a tune that I don't like and I have enough trouble learning tunes that I do like, so I certainly wouldn't waste my time playing tunes that I didn't like." Seamus's solution to the conundrum of accommodating Shaun Davey's new music in his burgeoning repertoire is a model of eco-friendliness - and pragmatism.
"For every tune that I learn, I think that I forget another one," he says nonchalantly, "because there's only so much room in the microchip upstairs. You know, a lot of people have come into the Gaeltacht and take away songs and tunes, but Shaun's the one person who's come in and given something back [in the form of a song cycle he composed to accompany the poetry of the late Caoimhín Ó Cinnéide]. Getting my hands on new songs - for me, that's like winning the lotto. And I've always wanted to sing with an orchestra. This is life beginning at 60!"
For Ó Floinn, it's Davey's facility to meld the Irish traditional and European classical idioms that excited him most. Uncharted waters are where this piper is at his best.
"It's a meeting of different idioms and of different cultures," he suggests. "When you marry classical and Irish traditional music, for example, it's a meeting that's hugely exciting - and terrifically challenging. To do it really well is really difficult, and when you succeed, you've created something new. There's a very natural tension between tradition and innovation. It's a perfectly healthy thing. It's how it's dealt with that matters. You have to keep faith with the tradition, while at the same time being aware of another musical landscape."
The prospect of bringing a new piece of music to life is one that whets Ó Floinn's appetite more than anything else. "In a tradition, you learn a new tune, but with a brand new piece of music, there's a huge sense of responsibility in giving that new music life for the first time. You create the style and the interpretation where there was none before, for those who may subsequently play it. Sometimes I'm asked to play new music, which is technically very demanding, but has no real 'heart', and to play it is to discover that the music itself is very ungrateful, because you need to be able to derive pleasure from real music. You always need a good tune, for starters."
Percussionist Noel Eccles has had a long association with Shaun Davey's music, having made his acquaintance with the composer during Davey's composition of The Brendan Voyage, when Eccles was a member of the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra. Eccles's description of Davey's writing process is akin to that of the prose stylist who places words in a particular order, or indeed the poet who places the right words in the right order.
"Shaun approaches the arrangement of traditional music on a grand scale," he says. "I've had the best teachers in the world, in terms of playing Mahler, Ravel, Shostakovich and Puccini, who were wonderful orchestrators. By being exposed to that music, you learn how they do it, and you apply it elsewhere. And sometimes a piece of music doesn't need loads of noise and lots of instruments. Sometimes it just needs a single note, and that's Shaun's secret: knowing how to arrange those notes."
The creative tension that exists between classical and traditional musicians is something that Liam Ó Floinn delights in, despite his innate apprehension at the start of any collaboration. Musical forces collide, the formality of the classical bends and sways to accommodate the unruly elements of the tradition, and it's at this intersection that sparks fly. The audience is often the ultimate arbiter of what works and what doesn't work, musically.
"It's not always easy to bridge that gap between musicians," Ó Floinn acknowledges, "but after the first live performance of The Brendan Voyage, which was a ground-breaking achievement, the atmosphere was so charged, and everyone present, both musicians and audience, shared this great moment. It was such a celebration of the music."
For his part in this massive coalition of energy that's gathering momentum as the Big Tunes and Anthems concert approaches, Shaun Davey is savouring the challenge of melding style and substance across a broad swathe of his repertoire.
"For me, it's to do with working with people who are themselves open- minded, and have a lot of courage, both as musicians and as people," he says. "There's a very strong human dimension to this music. I adore traditional music, its expressive power and its directness, and I love that special mix of dance music and airs, which celebrate the two different sides of the human experience: the joy and the sadness of it all. It's quite a social activity, this meeting of musical traditions, and when a traditional musician sits on an orchestra's stage, a very particular chemistry has to take place. You want the experience for both sides to be a good one, and there has to be an acceptance of risk from everyone involved. So my role is to be the cement between the bricks for the musicians.
"This is a hybrid music, a meeting between different traditions" he continues. "The essence of what I do is marrying traditions, and this kind of music cannot be created from within one tradition or the other, because each of those traditions simply exists to perpetuate themselves. That's what gives me a sense of urgency about staging this music in this way."
• The Music Of Shaun Davey: Big Tunes and Anthems, with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and conductor David Brophy, will be performed at the RTÉ Summer Evening Series at the National Concert Hall on Fri, June 23 at 8pm. With special guests Liam Ó Floinn, Rita Connolly, Nollaig Casey, Noel Eccles, Tríona Marshall, The Tallaght Choral Society and The Guinness Choral Society. Tickets cost between €8.50 and €25. For further information, call 01-4170000
