Times change, mercifully. What was once consigned to the ghettoised session is now seeping through every crack and pore of our concert halls, lobbies, radios and television sets. Irish traditional music is standing up and taking its rightful place among the rest of the musics of the earth. Time was when, to hear a decent set of tunes, you had to navigate your way through feiseanna or ensconce yourself in the deepest, darkest heart of a pub. But trad music's palette has exploded with the arrival of alternative venues, academic recognition, hordes of disgustingly talented young players, and radio and TV producers with an ear for a good tune, who ensure that the music is aired well beyond the usual confines of daybreak and witching hour.
Meabh O'Hare personifies this bright new world of traditional music. Currently in her final year as a student of music in UCC, she cut her musical teeth on her beloved fiddle in West Belfast, perhaps not the most likely cradle of trad. Her stock has always been rising, but lately it has skyrocketed, with the announcement that she's TG4's "Young Traditional Musician Of The Year 2000."
A native of Andersonstown, O'Hare thrived on the underrated local tradition, wasting little time in acquainting herself with the repertoire of tunes as soon as she took up the fiddle and bow at the age of nine. "I started playing the whistle in primary school", she offers shyly, none too anxious to embark on anything remotely resembling a self-promotion exercise, "and at that stage, three of us were picked to go to the School of Music to learn classical music. I suppose I realised then that I had a musical ear."
It was a promise that wasn't limited to music either. "If I wasn't playing music, I was dancing or painting or drawing," she says.
Once bitten by the bug, she lost little time in seeking out the McPeake Family (cited by Van Morrison as an influence too) on the Falls Road, and later still, it was the famous Belfast fiddler Sean Maguire who took on her tutelage with his customary enthusiasm for nurturing fine musicians.
Meabh O'Hare is yet to absorb the full implications of having won an accolade, but still she's intent on wasting little time in making the most of it. "This award is such an honour", she acknowledges, "and I just can't believe it. I'm shocked that I've been chosen, but as well as a musician coming from Belfast, I was always kind of unsure where my tradition actually lay. I suppose it was up to me to realise that I had an amazing grounding in traditional music from the McPeakes and Sean Maguire, and from the musicians who play in the Belfast sessions like Andy Dixon and Davy Maguire, who really took me under their wing."
Her roots might initially have been unsteady, but O'Hare is no longer doubtful of the sense of place they afforded her. "I used to see musicians from down south who were so steeped in tradition, and I used to think: `Oh, I'm from Belfast', and I didn't really appreciate my own tradition," she says. "For a young musician from Belfast to get this credit is just fantastic. I think it means a lot to an awful lot of people in Belfast too."
She flinches at any hint of a suggestion that the music is laden with political baggage in her hometown, though she acknowledges that such assumptions are often made.
"Of course, anything cultural at all in Belfast could be looked at as political", she nods, "but the fact is that a lot of the musicians I played with were Protestants. Of course the music crosses boundaries, but there will always be people who will make the music political, and at times, of course it does become political. But I was very lucky that politics didn't come in to the music, even though I would be very political myself. Anyway, it's more style than politics that distinguishes traditional music in Belfast, with the single bowing, and not that much ornamentation, and drones, and using the fourth finger. And of course there's a great link between Donegal playing and Belfast."
She's already got one TV series on traditional music in the can, a 10-part series called Banished Misfortune, which will see the light of day on RTE 1 in the new year. Then there's the minor detail of two CD releases, one with Providence (a Belfast band which she had to leave for reasons of geography), and another with Fiddlesticks called Racket In The Rectory. Her fiddle has also been in demand by Ronan Keating on his single, If You Love Me. For now, though, with the glare of the media on the horizon, it's still the session that beckons loudest.
"I suppose, to be sensible, I should go and do my H. Dip," she volunteers quietly. "But I can't wait to get out and start playing. I just want to start performing. I've toured in Germany and I loved the lifestyle, and I thrived on meeting people and just really getting into living that lifestyle, but not doing the drinking part of it. I think if you know your capabilities, it's a fantastic lifestyle."
Wisely, she refuses to be sucked in to the ever-present debate between purists and those who see traditional music's reinterpretation as its lifeline. Music is much more vibrant and resilient than these arguments suggest, she insists.
"If you are your own person, you can't help putting your own stamp on a tune", she says. "That's what the whole tradition is all about. That's what creating and performing is all about. You don't take a tune you heard from Frankie Gavin or Tommy Peoples and play it exactly as they played it. Sure the audience would be better off going off to listen to them playing in that case. For the music to develop, there has to be some sort of movement, to let it evolve. That's what the creative process is all about."
Meabh O'Hare will accept her award as "TG4 Young Traditional Musician of the Year" at the TG4 National Traditional Music Awards 2000 Concert in the Cork Opera House on Saturday at 8 p.m. Among the other musicians playing will be De Dannan, Karan Casey, Steve Cooney, Mary Bergin and Mike McGoldrick. This concert will be transmitted on TG4 on Sunday at 9.25 p.m.
