Na Píobairí Uilleann

Chairman, NPU

An Píobaire

1

8 1 22 20120206 22 THE UILLEANN PIPES IN CONTEMPORARY CONCERT MUSIC Part 1 – John Cage, Séamus Ennis and Roaratorio Dr. Dave Flynn I N 1979 the American avant-garde com- poser John Cage created one of his largest works, the epic Joycean sound collage Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake. Cage utilised the talents of six of Ireland’s leading traditional musicians of the time in this work; singer Joe Heaney, flautist Matt Molloy, bodhrán playing father and son Peadar and Mel Mercier, fiddler Paddy Glackin and the great piper Séamus Ennis. The extent of Cage’s utilisation of Irish traditional musicians was unprecedented, no Irish composers had utilised their native instruments and music in such a way. The use of the pipes in this work is similar to the use of all the other instruments. Paddy Glackin explained to me, with Joycean wit, the process Cage used to put the music together. I got a phone call one day from this fella at work and he said ‘Hi, I’m John Cage’ and I said ‘Howya’, I’d never heard of him! So he said ‘I’m composing this piece of music and I’d like you to play in it’, so I said ‘right, grand’. So he said ‘Can I come and record you?’ and I said ‘Well listen, you’re going to have to come down to Clare to record me,’ cos I was going down to the Willie Clancy Week. So he said ‘Where’s that?’ and I said ‘It’s on the west coast of Ireland’ so I thought I was getting rid of him to be honest with you and he said ‘Well I’ll come down so’. So we came out of the class and this guy came up said ‘Hi, I’m John Cage’ so I said ‘Howya, grand’. He says ‘I spoke to you over the phone last week’ I said ‘Yes’ and he says ‘Can I record you now?’. So, to get rid of him I said ‘Look, ok I’ll do it’. So we went back and I recorded twenty min- utes cos he said ‘Well I just want 20 minutes of music exactly’ and I said ‘yeah, grand’. So he had a stop-watch and I’d play away and stop and he’d say ‘Right, you’ve got seventeen min- utes to give me.’ So we worked our way through it and when we were finished he said to me ‘When I get this finished would you be available to come and perform this piece of music in the Pompidou Centre in Paris.’ I said ‘Yeah, talk to you again’. I didn’t believe him and within three weeks I was off in the Pompidou Centre doing this piece. Séa- mus Ennis was supposed to do it, he couldn’t so Liam O’Flynn did it. Matt Molloy was supposed to do it, he couldn’t do it so Séamus Tansey did it, the two Merciers (Peadar and Mel) and the great Joe Heaney and that was it. It was an ex- traordinary thing but I remember when we came in thinking ‘Jesus, this guy is absolutely mad.’ It didn’t make any sense to me whatsoever what he was doing and the first time, I remember when we did it. We did it in Toronto. I remember look- ing at Liam, I said ‘What are we doing here?’, but after a while I think the whole thing began to make a lot of sense and we loved doing it and we did it all over the world and then Merce Cun- ningham became involved and put dance to it and that really went well. So the whole sort of thing of the coming to- gether of dance, this ‘chance operation’ musi- cally, something that hadn’t been rehearsed and then it goes on the stage. It was extraordinary, it was great fun and he was an extraordinary man to know, John Cage. I got to know him very, very well and he had a deep, deep under- standing of what our music was all about. He could see below the surface of it.

8

22

[Periodical]

2012-02-01T00:00:00

anonymous,guest,friend,member