From swerve of shore to bend of bay
THE Irish premiere of Roaratorio: an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake has been some 30 years in the pipeline. Roaratorio was written in 1979 by one of the 20th century’s seminal artistic figures, the late John Cage, as a sound experience of James Joyce’s book. The work has played in cities worldwide in the last three decades and will be performed in Ireland for the first time on Saturday in Cork Opera House.
Fiddle-player Paddy Glackin became involved in the piece from an early stage. “John had come to Ireland to make the piece and he got in touch with Ciarán MacMathúna at RTÉ, who I think recommended me,” says Glackin, also a sports editor for RTÉ radio. “I got a phone call from John one day and to be honest with you I hadn’t heard of the guy. He wanted me to record some music for this piece he was writing.
“I was a little bit sceptical. I said I wouldn’t be around, I’d be at the Willie Clancy Summer School, which was the truth. He asked me could he come and record me there and I said yes, but I thought no more about it. Then, when I was there teaching one day, at the end of class a small man came to the door.”
The man was Cage, and Glackin recorded with him and the sound recordist John Fullemann, who’s also sound engineer for the concert in Cork. “John was quite specific about it in terms of duration,” says Glackin. “He was very exact. Afterwards I didn’t think of it again until one day he called and asked would I be available to perform it. We had the first performance in Toronto.”
The first time Glackin heard the finished piece was in rehearsals in Toronto. “I really thought it was off the wall, it made no sense to me. It was so different to anything I’d been involved in and still is. But after eight days of rehearsing, by the time we’d performed it, I started to grow an affinity with it.”
As with so much of Cage’s work, no two performances of the piece are the same. “I’ve performed it a lot over the years and it’s different all the time, and depending on the space that we’re in you hear different things. And I don’t necessarily play the same tunes that I did in 1979, or even two months ago in Cologne and Amsterdam.”
The piece includes text from throughout Joyce’s book recorded by Cage himself, and selected using a complex system, typical for Cage, of strict rules and chance.
There is also live and recorded traditional music, including recordings made of singer Joe Heaney, as well as tapes of over 2,293 different sounds mentioned in the course of the book and collected from all over the world.
“You’ve got to go in with a very open mind,” Glackin explains. “It’s an aural experience, a soundscape — just try and listen to it. It will challenge you, no doubt. It can bring images to your mind. There’s one particular part for me, when it sounds like a tug boat leaving the harbour to all intents and purposes, but it’s actually an Inuit doing a kind of throat singing. There are times when I get images of the Phoenix Park, or times that connect me with people I would have known. In the middle is a section with a poem Cage wrote, a mesostic, a play on the words James Joyce. Joyce is all the way though the piece.”
What do Glackin’s peers make of the work? “I think a lot of traditional musicians would be intrigued by it, but we did it in London and I don’t think many traditional musicians came. But it’s not traditional music, it’s a different sort of thing. Since it’s the first time it has been performed here, though, the opportunity hasn’t been there for most Irish musicians.”
Glackin confesses that Joyce’s book remains impenetrable for him. “I can only imagine what it’s about, I’ve started Finnegans Wake several times but I never got into it. I’ve read some of his other books and enjoyed them.”
The Cork performance will include bones player Mel Mercier, who featured in the original production with Peadar Mercier, his father.
“We also have Séamus Tansey on flute and Liam O’Flynn on pipes,” Glackin says. “But the setup is different every time we do it. It depends on the architecture — sometimes we’ll have two musicians on stage and two in the gallery.”
* Roaratorio: an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, Cork Opera House, Saturday
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