Composer Shaun Davey's suite of songs and music based on the poetry of Caoimhín Ó Cinnéide is a labour of delight, he tells Siobhán Long
West Kerry has never been a bastion of formality. It's the impromptu impulse that thrives there. Sessions flourish, meitheals materialise when the sun shines, and creative collisions aren't so much welcomed as expected - whenever and wherever there's a gathering in a pub, church or the vicinity of a kitchen sink.
Which is not to say, though, that all who venture past the Conor Pass can expect an indiscrimate knees-up. All of this creative energy prospers precisely because there's an unspoken agreement that everybody brings something to the table. The contribution is what matters: its ability to fire the imagination, not its shape or size or its wily ability to lure multitudes to its feet.
Shaun Davey is no stranger to this potentially explosive process of collaboration. His alliance with piper Liam O'Flynn resulted in the oceanic sweep that was The Brendan Voyage in 1980, a timely exploration of the melding of orchestral and traditional music in all its terrifying glory. After that, there was The Pilgrim, Granuaile and The Relief of Derry Symphony.
These days he's busily preparing for a grand concert with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and, among others, Liam O'Flynn, Rita Connolly, Seamus Begley, Edelmiro Fernández, Nollaig Casey and percussionist Noel Eccles. The concert features material from The Brendan Voyage and The Relief of Derry Symphony, including a newly composed battle sequence for the latter, but another reason for Davey's soaring enthusiasm lately is yet another collaboration, which will see the light of day at Dingle's Féile na Bealtaine on May 12th.
"If you don't sing in west Kerry", he says, half joking, all in earnest, "you're dead. Sing or die, that's the reality of life there!"
So Davey and his wife, singer Rita Connolly, have joined in the melee - in earnest. A suite of songs and music based on the poetry of the late Baile na nGall poet, teacher, broadcaster and journalist, Caoimhín Ó Cinnéide, is a labour not so much of love as of unmitigated delight, mediated by the combined energies of Ó Cinnéide's daughter, Éilís, local box player and singer Seamus Begley, Rita Connolly and Ó Cinnéide's widow, Edna.
"It was Mary Begley who's been the scholarly influence, and Seamus who's been the musical one," Davey offers expansively, in an attempt to ascribe linear progression to what has been a multilayered and rapid escalation in activity level since the project's inception last February. "Caoimhín's poems were published by his family after he died, in a book titled Fothair na Manach [now out of print] and they are his reflections on the community that he lived in, his tributes to people and his retelling of epic stories in that community. Some of them are quite tongue-in-cheek, some are very brief. He was a man who had a lot to say and much of it found its way into these poems, which he himself seems to have thought very little of. Many of them were written on the backs of envelopes and on cigarette packs."
It was their basic humanity and love of community that drew Davey to Ó Cinnéide's poems. Ranging from epic tales of Famine-era fishing expeditions beyond An Tiaracht, the outermost of the Blasket Islands, to the rescue of a young Breton fisherman at the foot of the cliffs near Cuas, to the musings of two elderly men in winter, recounting the distant days of summer, all human life was distilled there, begging to be revisited. Ironically, it's a visitation that has been undertaken by a musician whose own facility with the Irish language is at more than a grammarian's remove from full fluency.
"I actually enjoy writing music with words that I don't fully understand," Davey admits, with disarming honesty, "because it makes the song, for me, more of a mystery and more interesting. Of course I know what the poems mean, but it's still a great adventure for me."
Rita Connolly adds further to the magical thinking that straddles what could so easily have been a linguistic divide.
"We are all absolutely gobsmacked that Shaun can take a language he doesn't understand and make sense of it," she says. "And not only make sense of it but have the song suit the lyric. Every one of the songs is fundamentally right in relation to what the song is saying. There's definitely been divine intervention here."
Davey can't deny the crucial influence of Seamus Begley on his latest foray into traditional music either. Having bought a house within spitting distance of Begley just four years ago, Davey found himself in thrall to a musician and singer who in his childhood was castigated by sean-nós singing competition adjudicators, who solemnly declared: 'Tá do guth ró-bhinn" ("Your voice is too sweet").
"He's such a consummate musician, who sings beautifully," Davey says, his ears well-attuned to the finesse that lurks behind the bluff and bluster of this most rumbunctuous of musicians. "He's quite unlike anybody else I know, and just the thought of trying to put melodies in his mouth is something I've thoroughly enjoyed doing."
AS WITH Ó CINNÉIDE'S poetry, it's the inherent simplicity of the musical arrangements and harmonies that marks this venture apart, according to Rita Connolly, who's got a fire in her belly at the prospect of sharing in these songs from west Kerry, now her second home.
"We've got wonderful harmonies, which is not something that you hear a lot of in that part of the country," she says. "And now that we know the music and the lyrics, it just sounds so effortless. My only regret is that when we perform, nobody's going to know how much work we've put into this! But for me to be singing with these people, who in my view are some of the best singers in the country, is a real pleasure."
"We both really enjoy the tradition of singing that exists in west Kerry", Davey adds. "Music as a social communication. It's music with a purpose, and Rita and I aren't used to being part of that."
The fact is that Rita Connolly's own singing style bears close kinship with west Kerry, in that she sings first and foremost for herself, as Davey describes it.
"Without regard for any audience, it is a form of internal singing, often with your eyes closed," he says. "You sing the music as a form of contemplation, and that's how Seamus and Éilís and Rita sing - and that, to me, seems to be the only correct way to sing a song. You literally sing to yourself. That's what an audience witnesses.
"It doesn't work for me for a singer to address an audience, and looking at them, eyeing them up, and projecting to and for them, serving the song up on a plate. Too often the performer gets in the way of the song. Which is why I think that singing in places like west Kerry is wonderful."
Connolly rows in behind Davey's picture of what it means to sing a song.
"The essence of it is when the singer becoming simply a medium for the song", she says. "It's the singer person saying 'this is the instrument' and what I'm about to do is what this instrument can do. You become literally a medium for the song. There it is, and this is my interpretation of it, and it's not about anything other than that."
Lest there be any confusion as to the raison d'être of this musical expedition, Davey cuts to the quick, insisting that it is no labyrinthine excavation of a terrain unknown to him or potentially inaccessible to an audience.
"These are very easy listening songs", he says. "These are not high art. They are meant to be accessible, tuneful. Songs that anybody can understand and sing."
Davey too, will have a certain novitiate status on May 12th for the premiere.
"I'll have a pedal harmonium, which I'm learning to play, just to play a real instrument rather than an electronic one. I love the sound of harmonium, and I love these bellows wheezing away. Because I think orchestrally, I like to hear from the bass right up to the high treble, therefore it's more satisfying to me to have an instrument thatcan supply an orchestration. So you have the orchestral wash from the harmonium, the tune from the box, the melody from Éilís's whistle and flute, and the percussion from the guitar - and that, to me, is a very complete sound."
• Shaun Davey's setting of the poetry of Caoimhín Ó Cinnéide with his impromptu band, Béal Tuinne, featuring Rita Connolly, Éilís Ní Cinnéide, Seamus Begley, Dáithí Ó Sé, Tim Eadey and Lawrence Courtney premieres at noon in St James's Church, Dingle, as part of Féile na Bealtaine. Further details: www.feilenabealtaine.com or 066-9151082