'WHEN I LEFT SCHOOL," says Eimear Quinn, "I studied environmental resource management.
Town planning, really." I try to imagine her in a hard hat and wellies, and fail utterly. Seated opposite me in the coffee shop at the National Gallery, Quinn looks like something which has floated in from Planet Supersylph: slim, blonde, her perfect skin absolutely devoid of make-up. But then, if I hadn't seen her win the Eurovision Song Contest with my own eyes, I wouldn't be able to visualise Quinn as part of the Big Frock Brigade either, writes
Arminta Wallace
She just isn't made of Eurovision stuff. She's cut from a more gossamer musical cloth altogether, and it's shown off to perfection in the independent film
A Christmas Celebration with Eimear Quinn, which will be shown on RTÉ 1 television on Monday night.
If the words "Christmas celebration" make you cringe, relax. Quinn's is a classy rather than a schmaltzy affair, shot in the plush interiors of Castle Leslie in Co Monaghan, lit by log fires and the rich patina of old wood, intercut with luscious wintry landscape images and populated by a band of top-notch musicians including Donal Lunny and Máirtín O'Connor. The format is simple - Quinn speaks briefly about each piece of music, sings it, then moves on to the next. "The idea was to create something that would be amoment for pause amid the madness," Quinn says.
"On the first night of Christmas week you can sit down with your cup of tea - or your glass of wine - and just lose yourself in the music."
You can also, however, find much that's new.
It's probably fair to say that you've never heard
Silent Nightdone as Quinn does it - accompanied by the eerie, metallic sound of the hammered dulcimer, and minus all those sugary harmonies which the ear has come to expect. "And in a minor key," Quinn confesses with a smile. "I hope it doesn't upset people. But I just wanted to make it my own. When I sing
Silent Nightto myself, I've often heard those particular sounds, so it was great to get the opportunity to arrange it that way. And I love the hammered dulcimer. I just love the sound of it . . ."
And she's off, explaining with great enthusiasm the different sizes of dulcimer, how you can change the sound from raw and sparkly to damp by wrapping cotton around the beaters. How on the film the dulcimer player is a musician by the name of Miroslav Vavak, a graduate of Bratislava Conservatoire who is currently working in Tesco in Jervis Street - a fact of contemporary Irish life which gives us both a moment of pause.
Quinn, it turns out, also has an adopted home.
Born in Dublin, she has been living in Monaghan for seven years. "My husband Noel is from between Ardee and Carrickmacross," she says, "and I knew he'd want to go back eventually. So we bought a really old farmhouse, gutted it, and kind of lived in it for a few years. And then our dreams got a bit bigger and we renovated it. In Monaghan they put the lofted shed in front of the house. Did you ever notice that? So we renovated that part; and there's a link building, so it's kind of a courtyard-y shape. We've really made it our own. We stay in Dublin a couple of nights a week, but I can't write music in Dublin. It doesn't work for me. As I say in the film, we have a fabulous view of Slieve Gullion from our house. It's very beautiful."
Quinn's affinity with the landscape of Monaghan led directly to her setting of Patrick Kavanagh's poem
Carol 1942."I think that all artists in south Monaghan feel some kind of kindred spirit with Kavanagh," she says. "because he was so close to the land and wrote so eloquently - though not always positively - about the surroundings. You can't escape it, because you hear his words all the time when you see the places. And he was a wonderful mystic. It was extraordinary, the wonder that he saw in the plainest things." The melody for her setting came to her while she was leafing through a book of poems. That often happens with her compositions, she says - they come to her, in an organic kind of
way. "Occasionally I dream a melody and words, with a chorus and harmony," she says. "That happened with the song Winter Apples which is the first song on my CD. I dreamt the chorus, in its entirety, and the vista of the story - like a film."
She is currently writing a Requiem Mass, which she hopes will be premiered in the New Year.
Now honestly, can you see this woman singing in the Eurovision? How on earth did she end up there? Let's rewind a little. Having grown up in a musical family in Tallaght village, Quinn sang with her older sister in various children's choirs in St Mary's Priory there. "I was always dedicated
to making noise in some shape or form," she says. She took singing lessons at the DIT College of Music, where Ite O'Donovan was choral director.
"In fact, Ite gave me my very first public gig," Quinn recalls. "Myself and Joanne Harding sang the Haydn Mass for Two Sopranos at the Pro-Cathedral one Sunday morning. I got paid the princely sum of £20. I wish I could have afforded to have kept the cheque, but I couldn't!"
Despite the town planning studies, Quinn knew she wanted to pursue a career in music - so when she graduated from DIT, she signed up for a degree in musicology at Maynooth. There, she fell in love with the complexities of Gregorian chant. "It literally is a way of life," she says, "because at a practical level it marks the hours of the day and the weeks of the year. It dawned on me when I was studying chant where the expression 'to do something religiously' came from. That whole aspect of chant fascinated me deeply; the idea that for hundreds and hundreds of years, the same piece of music would be chanted on one day only, and that's it. For example, the
O Antiphons,which I sing in the Christmas film.
They were first documented in the 6th century. So for a millennium and a half - for ever! - they've been sung only between the 16th and the 23rd of December."
During this time Quinn was singing in Christ Church Cathedral Choir under the direction of Mark Duley and, with five other members of the choir, formed the five-strong early music group Zefiro. Then, in 1995, she joined the chamber choir Anúna. "I loved singing with them," she says. "I had done an awful lot of choral singing before I joined Anúna - but it was always conducted.
This was the first choral group that I was in that had no conductor. So it's very difficult. All the timing and tuning and dynamics is done through listening. I always think, when I hear Anúna singing, they're like a flock of starlings you know? When one moves, they all move together because everyone is listening so intently. For that reason, recording with them - I've done two albums with Anúna - is also extraordinary."
Quinn sang as a principal soloist with Anúna for just 18 months, but it was enough to propel her into a totally different musical orbit. At a Christmas concert in St Patrick's Cathedral in 1995, she sang the solo part in Brendan Graham's song
Winter, Fire and Snow."He was sitting in the audience, and afterwards, he came up and gave me his card and asked me to call him." Graham had written a song called The Voice, and had it recorded by the traditional group Dervish.
"He hadn't recorded it as a Eurovision song," Quinn explains. "But he submitted it and it qualified.
But by then Dervish were touring all over the world, so he needed a singer to sing it." Quinn found herself hurtled into the mad, mad world of Eurovision. Or is it mad? "Oh, absolutely,"
she says. "It's hysterical. The glitziest, blingiest . . . I mean, it's so far removed from the musical world that I had been involved in up to that point, which was all dark cloisters and candles and starchy cassocks and surplices. To the point where I had no idea even how to put on makeup."
Needless to say, there was somebody in Oslo to do that for her. "It was great fun," she says. "It really was. When it comes down to it, I'm actually a girlie kind of girl and I enjoyed that element. "But it was mental. Like, it really was crazy. I didn't know how to deal with it or integrate it into my life in any way whatsoever. I did Eurovision on a Saturday, came home on a Sunday, and sat my university exams on Monday. Which was crazy, particularly as the song itself did really well - it went into the UK Top 40, which a Eurovision song hadn't done for years. So I had the record company in the UK saying, 'Come on, you need to do publicity. Keep the momentum going'. And I was saying, 'I'm sorry, I've got my
counterpoint exams tomorrow'. I don't think anybody knew what to make of it - myself included."
Finally she made the decision to defer her final year at college and go with the flow: up to a point. When she talks about the gigs which followed her Eurovision victory - a tour of Australia with Donal Lunny and his band, a stint with a producer in Nashville, an appearance at the Royal Albert
Hall - none of that actually sounds very Eurovision either. "No," she says. "That was the thing. Because, to be honest, I had no pre-packaged image wrapped up and ready to go. So I didn't fall into the whole post-Eurovision circuit.
I gained a bit of a profile and I got opportunities to go and sing with other people; but really I just sang my own stuff. I think it went the only way it possibly could have at the time." Oddly enough, however, the whole shebang widened her musical horizons. "It allowed me to branch out from purely classical singing," she says. "I had become very, very blinkered about doing anything other than that - I mean, I wanted to be a professional chorister. That was my dream, you know? To sing with The Sixteen or The Tallis Scholars or something."
Winning the Eurovision allowed her to do just that; she sang Allegri's Miserere with The Sixteen in London last year. It's an 18th-century piece whose famously - or infamously - high soprano part was originally written for castrato; but Quinn's effortless top is one of the most remarkable aspects of her voice. So, no pressure then, singing with one of the world's most highlypraised classical vocal ensembles? "I was terrified," she insists. "I was standing there with the music ready to go - the four of us soloists were down one end of the church, and The Sixteen were up on the altar. And I was going, 'Oh, my, God - what did I open my mouth for? I'm gonna open it now and nothing will come out'. It was so intimidating. Of course, they were all gorgeous and lovely - and the director, Harry Christophers, is a lovely man. All lovely. But I was so scared."
She has always suffered from pre-performance nerves. "I used to be in flitters before I went on stage. Terrified. At the Feis Ceoil, my mother would be trying to breathe for me, because I couldn't get my breath at all. Actually the Eurovision was a big turning point in that regard because I thought, 'Right. Now, I've actually been hired to do this job, so I have to be professional. I haven't got the luxury of being a scared child'."
Nowadays she uses breathing exercises to calm herself down. And we can all use Christmas with Eimear Quinn to calm ourselves in preparation for the storm ahead: and to restore ourselves to some of
that child-like wonder without which the festive season goes as flat as a pancake.