AT A loose end for something to do last Friday night, I read in The Ticket that Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill were playing Dublin’s “controversial” new traditional music venue, Clasac. That sounded interesting in more ways than one, I thought. So I jumped in the car and headed out to Clontarf, trying to remember what the supposed controversy involved.
It came back to me en route. There had been claims about a VAT refund irregularity that, while not involving misappropriation of funds, had been of sufficient concern for the headquarters of Comhaltas Ceoltóirií Éireann to dissolve its Clontarf branch last year. The latter had counter-argued that Comhaltas was just using the issue as a pretext to advance its agenda of seizing control of Clasac, the €9 million project initiated and driven by the Clontarf membership.
There followed the inevitable split: into a provisional Clontarf branch – Ceoltóirí Chluain Tarbh, which claims most if not all of the original members (400 of them) – and an official one, approved by headquarters. After that, as far as I could remember, there was just a stand-off, punctuated by the occasional exchange of solicitors letters.
Now that the venue had finally opened for concerts, however, perhaps there would be an escalation of hostilities.
By the time I reached Alfie Byrne Road on Friday night, I was expecting to see pickets outside, at the very least. I’ve heard of fights breaking out at traditional music sessions over the misinterpretation of a tune, or the unauthorised use of a bodhrán. Maybe ownership of the new venue would be contested in the manner of the Four Courts, 1922.
In fact the event passed off peacefully. There were no protests outside or in, and no sign whatever of the row that traditional music wags have dubbed variously the “Battle of Clontarf” or “Comhaltas Interruptus”.
The only hint of discord was in the building’s architectural features, which are conspicuously angular. Although, for example, the front of the 250-seat auditorium is set at a traditional 90-degrees with the stage, the back of the hall veers off in a slightly different direction: which is either a response to the site’s space constraints, or an attempt to evoke the shape of a fiddlers elbow.
As for the concert, Hayes and Cahill were – typically – brilliant. If anything, the venue seems a bit too clean for a music genre long synonymous with smoke-stained ceilings and beer-soaked carpets. But the great fiddle player and his masterfully understated guitar accompanist are no strangers to the world’s concert halls and their sound is pristine enough for any of them, including this.
Among the pieces they played was a tune called The Fiddler's Key, which Hayes explained was written by a female friend who had noticed that most of his music was in the minor keys – usually associated with sadness – and especially G-minor. The Clareman is not the only virtuoso to have a fondness for this scale. A man called Mozart used it a lot too, when evoking tragedy.
Even so, Hayes's music is not all sad, by any means. It's true that if you closed your eyes during some of the more melancholy tunes – say The Night Before Larry Was Stretched– you could be in Miltown Malbay on a drizzly evening in November, with a sea fog rolling in across the treeless fields, past the deserted holiday homes and the closed doors of pubs that have just gone out of business.
But then the slow tune will blend into a slightly jauntier one, and then something even quicker. And suddenly the fog lifts and the sun rises again and it’s early July in Miltown, with happy children playing on the beach at Spanish Point, and surfers, and ice cream vans, and people doing the Clare Set outside the Armada hotel.
By the end of one of these medleys, Hayes will be a man possessed: his right foot tapping like a jack-hammer and his hair hopping like the wig of an Irish dancer going for the gold medal at a Feis. Every foot in the hall will be tapping too and its owner smiling, perhaps unconsciously. At such times, Hayes is Yeats's Fiddler of Dooneyincarnate, making his audience dance like the waves of the sea.
But speaking of Larrys, stretched or otherwise, the last public exchange in the Clasac row was a broadside fired on RTÉ in February by Comhaltas Ceoltóirií Éireann director general, Senator Labhrás Ó Murchú, in which he again spoke of VAT irregularities. Ceoltóirí Chluain Tarbh again rebutted this in a solicitors letter and reiterated its demand that the branch be reinstated. And since then the two sides have resumed their stand-off, like boys and girls facing each other across the floor at the school céilí.
I couldn’t find any members of the dissolved branch at Friday night’s event, probably because they weren’t there. A spokesman has since told me that although there is no formal boycott – and they don’t want to discourage children from doing classes or sessions in Clasac – he would be surprised if any his members attended a concert in a venue they spent 15 years planning. I put in a call to Comhaltas too, asking for an update on the row.
But at time of going to press, I’m still waiting to hear it.