Edel Coffey: Documenting and remembering the voices and artists of Ireland
Edel Coffey. Photo: Ray Ryan
Last weekend, I went along to see the writer Colm Tóibín give his first lecture as Ireland’s laureate for Irish fiction. Lecture is probably the wrong word, as ‘lecture’ sounds so deeply punitive and boring and unenjoyable, whereas anyone who has heard Colm Tóibín talk in any capacity will know that he is one of the most entertaining speakers you will ever listen to. The talk was entitled, , and saw Tóibín relay all sorts of hilarious stories from his life as a lover of music, from childhood right through to adulthood. He spoke about his first time witnessing great Irish singers such as Maighréad and Tríona Ni Dhomhnaill and Iarla Ó Lionárd. And then, those extraordinary singers quietly appeared on the stage and if we hadn’t understood from Tóibín’s words just how special they were, we realised it as soon as they started singing.
Tóibín’s talk was interspersed with stories, not just of music, but of Irishness at different times in his life, the decorum involved in a sing-song or trad session, our heritage, and the type of people we are, from the islanders to the difference between Dubliners and the rest of the country. Being from Enniscorthy, Tóibín often fell between two stools in that Dubliners identified him as an outsider, while the rest of the country mistook him for a Dubliner (a terrible burden).
Towards the end of the night, Tóibín told a story about meeting a thin, hungry-looking man in the 1970s. He described him as looking not just hungry physically, but hungry of spirit too. He met him in The Stag’s Head pub in Dublin one Saturday morning, where Tóibín had gone to read the papers in peace. He had a book with him and the mysterious man approached Tóibín and asked if he had ever managed to get his hands on a copy of John McGahern’s book, , had he ever read it?
Tóibín told him, sure, didn’t he have it at home on his bookshelf and quickly realised that the stranger was not aware that the book was no longer banned, and that it was now in print, freely available to buy in paperback from any bookshop. The man asked for Tóibín’s address, as he decided he wanted to give him something but Tóibín cautiously suggested that they meet instead at the same time and place on the following Saturday. And so they did. Tóibín brought a copy of and the man brought an LP, which turned out to be a recording of a piece of music he had composed himself, his . His name was Frederick May and he happened to be one of Ireland’s most talented composers. The story was a sad one ultimately.
May was a brilliant composer but he had bad luck. He developed tinnitus, and later deafness, and was thwarted in his role as musical director in the Abbey. Tóibín described him as somewhat embittered about his career, and he famously danced on the grave of Ernest Blythe who had been managing director of the Abbey. May thought of himself as a forgotten Irish composer, he didn’t think anybody knew who he was. If you look him up now, you’ll see him described as one of Ireland’s grandfathers of contemporary music, the least insular Irish composer of his generation and as spearheading Irish musical modernism.
After his essay, Tóibín welcomed a string quartet on to the stage to perform some of May’s String Quartet. To think that 40-odd years ago, sitting in the Stag’s Head with a young Colm Tóibín, May thought he was forgotten, a nobody. Could he have imagined that many years from then, the young man would be Ireland’s laureate for Irish fiction and that his music would be written about by Tóibín as ‘one of the greatest contributions to Irish beauty that has ever been made’ and performed live in front of hundreds of people. And get a standing ovation.
The music was extraordinary but even more extraordinary was the gesture, the very deliberate gesture to pick up a thread that looped back to that conversation in the Stag’s Head decades before and to pull it into the present, and to braid it into the future. In short, the gesture to keep another person’s art from oblivion, to keep another person’s art alive.
The record that May had given Tóibín that day had been put out by Claddagh Records, who also do such important work in preserving so much Irish music and spoken word. Tóibín’s beautiful gesture to highlight May’s work in his inaugural lecture as laureate for Irish fiction, along with the voices of singers such as the Ní Dhomhnaills and Ó Lionárd, reminded me that, for art to survive, it needs supporters – and passionate fans – like Tóibín. It doesn’t exist on its own inside a record sleeve or enclosed in the covers of a book. It needs fans to do as the old sean-nós singers and storytellers did, share it with each other, pass it on, and hand it down.
In this way, no matter who does the remembering, art is never forgotten.
