Even the cheesiest pop song can transport us to another place. So when the music is as evocative as 'Songs of the Auvergne', it's hard to resist taking a trip, Paul Herriott tells Arminta Wallace
Tasted any good music lately? Some hearty chunks of Haydn, perhaps, or a Chopin waltz, sweet as a nut? Even the cheesiest pop song has the power to transport you to another time and place so suddenly that, for a blissful second, you could swear you can smell roses. Imagine, then, the evocative power of a series of songs written by a composer who was convinced that his patch of the planet - the mountainous triangle between the French cities of Lyons, Clermont-Ferrand and Saint-Etienne, which takes in the likes of Le Puy and Domeyrat Castle- were an earthly paradise. According to Paul Herriott of RTÉ Lyric FM's The Blue of the Night, Joseph Canteloube's Songs of the Auvergne are so evocative they're almost edible - which is why he has made a radio documentary about them.
"Shimmering, that's what everybody says about them," he says. "They shimmer. They really are miniature masterpieces, with intricate orchestration and a glittering soundscape, and they conjure up that part of France like nothing else. Nowadays they tend to be sung by opera singers, but they were written as folk songs, based on people shouting to each other down the valley - which, in days gone by, was apparently a genuine means of communication for shepherds and shepherdesses. But we didn't want to make a programme about shepherds and shepherdesses prancing through the hills, gathering mushrooms and stuff."
So what is the programme about? For starters, Herriott spoke to some key interpreters of the songs - Victoria de los Angeles, Kiri Te Kanawa, Dawn Upshaw and Véronique Gens - as well as Kent Nagano, who orchestrated the Upshaw recording when he was conducting Lyons Opera. It took Herriott several years to assemble this stellar line-up of interviewees, but he says it was worth the wait. "To get people of that calibre you have to be patient. If you rush it, you haven't a hope. Their commitments are so great. When we finally got them, though, they gave extremely generously of their time."
But Songs of the Auvergne isn't a music-history programme. It isn't even a let's-compare-the- recordings programme. "What I wanted to do was re-create the sense of pleasure that the songs have brought to me, and to others, over the years," says Herriott, who first heard them at drama school. "I got a job as an assistant stage manager on a dance tour. A dogsbody, basically - but I thought it was wonderful. A real theatre: imagine. So there I was, standing in the wings, and a choreographer had done what I think they call a triptych, where you have a frame on three sides, like a dressing-table mirror, and the dancers step out of the three sides, like a jewellery box come to life. Three girls with flowers in their hair, dancing traditional reels to this earthy, medieval-sounding music."
It was, he says, a magical moment, not least because, in that "taste and smell" way, the music suddenly took him right back to childhood. "Until I was about seven my father used to take his holidays en bloc, so we would head off to the Continent with a tent and the car for six weeks," he says. "It made a tremendous impression on me. At that age, six weeks seems like forever. We'd meet up with friends from Belfast - these were the days with no mobiles, so it was a miracle that we ever managed to coincide, but we did sometimes - and we'd travel around and pitch our tent and eat French food. Which we kids didn't necessarily like, but there was nothing else. And the only thing we could drink, really, was watered-down rosé."
During the making of the programme, he had another series of close encounters with the French countryside. "Over the past couple of summers I've spent more hours than I care to remember creeping around with a microphone, collecting sound effects. I was hiding in a bell tower, trying to capture the sound of doves cooing, when the bell struck midnight and the doves went berserk and started flying around everywhere. Chasing cows in fields with bells on - the cows, not the fields - and standing on the banks of rivers, trying to record the sound of flowing water. And rivers, I promise you, either make no noise at all or sound like a toilet flushing."
Having gathered a mass of material, he then had the task of editing it under the watchful eye of the programme's producer, Gail Henry. "Gail is fantastic, because she reins me in. She worked with me on the documentary I did last year, Art Thou Troubled?, about Kathleen Ferrier."
Has Herriott, with these documentaries, taken a conscious decision to step outside the frame of his highly successful Blue of the Night programme? "Not really," he says. "I've been doing the programme for five years now, which may seem like a long time, but it's not a long time on the radio. It's just about enough for people to know that you're there."
In any case, he adds, The Blue of the Night has been in a continuous process of evolution. "Over the past year, for example, the current producer, Eoin Brady, had the idea of doing a series of live sessions with young Irish musicians. These have been so successful that we're going to have a live concert at the Guinness Hopstore at the end of November, with Anne-Marie O'Farrell and Iarla Ó Lionáird, among others. Of course, 10.30pm [ when The Blue of the Night begins] is very late for a concert to start, so it will probably be broadcast with a delay, with the live show starting at 9pm, say. So that's another new development."
Meanwhile, Songs of the Auvergne is ready to waft its way on to the airwaves. "It has been quite a challenge to do this kind of evocative programme rather than tell a story, which is what most radio documentaries do," says Herriott. Has he learned a great deal about the songs in the process of making it? "At the end, you don't really know any more than when you started," he says. "But the journey is certainly enjoyable. I think what these songs express, more than anything else, is the love for home. Whether that's a literal home, or a spiritual home or just a place which makes you feel happy. I think that's what we mean when we talk about 'home' - and it doesn't exist, really, within the human experience. Except when, as with these songs, we get a tantalising glimpse of it."
Artszone: Songs of the Auvergne is on RTÉ Lyric FM on Thursday at 8pm, repeated next Saturday at 6pm. The Blue of the Night is on RTÉ Lyric FM from Sunday to Thursday, 10.30pm to 1am. Its live concert will be at the Guinness Hopstore, Dublin, on November 27th