Seamus Heaney and Liam O'Flynn have recorded 'The Poet and The Piper', a work inspired by sean-nós, writes Ciaran Carson.
The night before I sat down to listen to this record of Seamus Heaney's voice and Liam O'Flynn's music, I happened to watch a television programme called Sean-nós. Sean-nós, literally, means "old-style", and generally refers to the highly-ornamented singing in the Irish language, of Connemara in the west of Ireland: an art which has persisted for centuries, and which is still, even today, constantly renovated.
One of the singers, a man in his eighties, was shown in his home, sitting at one side of the turf fire. Another old man, a brother maybe, sat a little to one side of him, head down, attentive. As the singer sang, the voice sometimes cracked in places, going up to the high notes; but, as the song unfolded, it seemed as if the singer had taken the cracks into account, as interstices or borderlines between notes. They were points on a linear map; and I thought again how the line of a sean-nós song is like one of those dirt-and-broken-limestone roads in Connemara, winding between stone walls, wandering between gradients, past ruined homesteads and new bungalows:
Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed
As you always do, are like a local road
We've known every turn of in the past
as Seamus Heaney puts it in The Wellhead. The Connemara singer's eyes were open; but he was gazing, it seemed, into a distance beyond the present moment - looking right back into the past, visiting again, in person, the circumstances of the song. His eyes shone. As the singer negotiated the loops and inclines of its landscape, the listening brother framed the words with his lips, like a silent fellow - traveller. His eyes were closed. The camera turned to the singer again, as he came to the end of his story, and focused on his blue eyes. Listening to The Wellhead today, I imagined the blind woman's eyes in that poem, which could see the sky at the bottom of a neighbour's well.
The image of the blind poet, of the blind musician, is an old one. The ancient Irish bards were required to lie in darkness, with a stone for a pillow, until they had composed their poem, whose verses wove interlocking aural patterns, like an oriental rug put into words. The famed O'Carolan, harper, composer, drinker, was blinded by smallpox in his teens. Poetry and music contemplated the inner landscape. They went hand in hand across it.
When the Welsh cleric, Giraldus Cambrensis, visited Ireland in 1185, he found little to praise in its people. "Although they are fully endowed with natural gifts," he wrote, "their external characteristics of beard and dress, and internal cultivation of the mind, are so barbarous that they cannot be said to have any culture . . . they live on beasts only, and live like beasts." Their one saving grace was their music. "It is only in the case of musical instruments that I find any commendable diligence in the people. They seem to me to be incomparably more skilled in these than any other people that I have seen . . . They glide so subtly from one mode to another, and the grace notes play around with such mesmerizing charm above the bass notes, that it could be said that the perfection of their art lies in its concealment."
The English poet and Elizabethan administrator, Edmund Spenser, visiting Ireland some 500 years later, found the Irish to be "a barbarous nation". Only in the case of their bards could he find something to praise, and that grudgingly; "I have caused [some of their poems], to be translated unto me, that I might understand them, and surely they savoured of sweet wit and invention, but skilled not of the goodly ornaments of poetry. Yet they were sprinkled with some pretty flowers of their own natural devise . . ." In the 16th century, the poets declaimed their poetry to music: poetry and music, then, were hand-in-glove, keeping time.
It has been said that all Irish traditional music aspires to the condition of sean-nós. This is a well-meaning generalisation, but there are grains of truth in it. The playing of slow airs in particular - as opposed to dance music - should pay attention to the unspoken words of the song to which they are attached; and the sound of the chanter (on which the melody is played on the uilleann pipes) might be thought of as a proxy for the human voice. You can hear how in the The Yellow Bittern and Aisling Ghael, two beautiful examples of the slow air. Liam O'Flynn sometimes bends and flattens the notes as a singer might, and the little pops of silence he makes between phrases are like the glottal stops a singer uses to dramatise the contour of the melodic line. Or the narrative line, for all songs tell a story.
I believe poems should tell a story, or at least emerge from an implied narrative; I think of the subtle music of Seamus Heaney's 'Mossbawn Sunlight', in which there is "a space/again, the scone rising/ to the tick of two clocks"; and that tick enables us to see, I think, the room in which the poem occurs, as if a blind man sounded its dimensions with a cane. We see it measured retrospectively and introspectively. Then we see with our inner eyes the enduring image of the story's end: "love/ like a tinsmith's scoop/ sunk past its gleam/ in the meal-bin".
The first time I heard Seamus Heaney read was in the small back room of 4 University Square, in Belfast, at a meeting of what was known as "The Group".
It was, indeed, a small group, made up of a few poets who had proved themselves in the world of poetry, and others, like myself, who entertained some aspirations towards the art. One of the poems he read that winter night (in 1971, it must have been) was 'The Tollund Man'; and as he spoke it in that measured, hint-of-gravel voice, it seemed the walls of the smoke-filled room dissolved, and opened up to another, distant world, momentarily unfamiliar, then recognisable. "I will feel lost/ Unhappy and at home". The last lines of the poem sent a shiver down my spine.
I think again of the sean-nós singer in his small room, and his audience of two or three people, their eyes either open or closed, fixed on a time and space beyond them, that is still within them. I hear his beautiful ruined voice staggering purposefully and majestically across that internal landscape. He is singing An Bonnán Buí (The Yellow Bittern), which you hear on this record in Seamus Heaney's translation: a song about a bird who died for want of drink on a frozen lake, with only a pane of ice between him and the water of life. Again I feel a shiver down my spine. The song ends, the singer nods. He is asked where he got it from. "From my father." "And was your father a good singer?" "He was a great singer."
"By God, the old man could handle a spade./ Just like his old man" says Seamus Heaney in 'Digging'. I think the old Connemara singer would have appreciated this poem. Much of the landscape of Connemara - little stony fields set in bogland has been shaped by generations of spade-work, men "stooping in rhythm through potato drills", often singing as they worked, renegotiating the words laid down by their ancestors, getting something new and fresh out of the old patterns.
The first time I heard Liam O'Flynn playing live was in the upstairs room of Slattery's bar in Capel Street, Dublin, some time in the 1970s. Liam was known then as Liam Óg (young) to distinguish him from his father, also Liam, who played the fiddle. But the epithet also carried with it an implication that the musician learned by heeding the previous generation, which Liam Óg did single-mindedly, absorbing the playing of the master pipers Leo Rowsome, Willie Clancy, and Séamus Ennis, who bequeathed his pipes to Liam. To be sure, Slattery's lounge was a bigger room than 4 University Square - packed, it held maybe 60 people, though I wasn't counting - but it fulfilled at least one of the conditions of an ideal traditional music venue, it had intimacy. As Liam Óg played, the room, I think, expanded, for traditional music has a kind of mnemonic; it reminds us of past times, and past venues, and brings to mind faces of absent friends. Yet it also drives the present into the future; it is great music for driving to.
Seamus Heaney's last poem on this record, 'Postscript', develops a recurrent trope in his poetry, the act of driving: driving as in getting from one place to another; driving as in driving at; driving as meditation. Appropriately, he is in Co Clare, the source of much of Liam O'Flynn's music. The car is a kind of mobile room, yet it is nearly open to the landscape and the buffets of the weather. Music, too, has that sort of vulnerability, as we strain to hear it coming from another place, perhaps blown in from the ocean, off the cliffs of Co Clare, as was the Pookas' Tune, Port na bPúcaí, or so the old people would have us believe.
We are no longer barbarians. In recent years Irish culture, through its literature, through the performances of groups such as The Chieftains and Altan, has been acclaimed by huge international audiences. On this record you will hear its roots: the solo voice in a room, making that space more than ample for itself and for its audience. Seamus Heaney and Liam O'Flynn are acknowledged masters of their respective crafts. They have learned from their fathers; but they also bring the authority of their voices to bear on the present, making it constantly new and different for us who have the privilege of hearing them.
As my own postscript, it occurs to me that their presence on this record, exemplifies the etymology of the word "record": from the Latin recordari, to call to mind, to get by heart.
This above is Ciaran Carson's sleeve notes for The Poet and The Piper, released this week on Claddagh Records