White Raven: In harmony with a wide range of influences

Kathleen Dineen’s musical education combined the traditions of her Co Cork parents, the wide  knowledge of the nuns in her school and the expertise of Aloys Fleischmann, writes Pet O’Connell.

What oceans divide, music connects, in the case of soprano Kathleen Dineen, who after a 30-year career in Switzerland, brings her international a-capella collective to her native Cork for the launch of their latest album.

Three-piece ensemble White Raven, whose members also have roots in France, America, and Iceland, explore a common sense of yearning for their respective homelands, on ‘Like a Wind O’er the Ocean’, to be launched at CIT on Thursday, February 8.

The group’s fourth album, it connects the disparate musical traditions of each member, Kathleen arranging their songs for a close vocal harmony strongly influenced by the medieval and early music in which all three singers have been immersed.

Like Macroom native Kathleen, American tenor and French resident Robert Getchell, and French baritone Mathias Spoerry, now living in Iceland, each has an ocean between the land of their birth and the place they now call home.

In Kathleen’s case it was music that first enticed to leave home for Switzerland, when she was awarded an Arts Council bursary to study medieval singing at Basel’s Schola Cantorum Basiliensis academy, where she went on to become a teacher.

It was a departure too from her roots in sean-nós singing, her parents having been native Irish speakers from the Múscraí Gaeltacht.

They instilled in her a love of the language and song, which provided Kathleen with her first stage experience, performing traditional songs such as the lullaby ‘Bog Braon’ in Feis Maitiú and Scór competitions.

Growing up in Coolcower near Macroom, it was the nuns at the town’s Convent of Mercy who gave Kathleen her first formal musical training.

“The education at the school in Macroom with the nuns was incredible. I know that now, looking back. We were taught all kinds of music, and theory and reading of music.

"They started us off when we were seven. I’ve been teaching for 25 years and I often ask students what kind of [musical] education they got and a lot of them say, no music at all in school.

"But we got an all-round musical education every day of the week.”

One of those nuns, the late Sister Columba, also offered Kathleen her first taste of music outside the Irish context.

“Her own teacher was Tilly Fleischmann, who was Aloys Fleischmann [Jnr]’s mother, so there was a direct link back to the German classical composers,” says Kathleen.

Composer Aloys Fleischmann himself was among an illustrious list of lecturers awaiting Kathleen when, to her surprise, she was accepted at UCC to study music.

“My parents were hoping I’d take a more secure future in primary teaching but I was delighted to be going to Cork and that was a fantastic time to be at UCC.

"The level of the education there was very, very high. I was in Fleischmann’s last class before he retired.

“We got such a comprehensive, thorough training in composition, keyboard skills, counterpoint, analysis, for classical music, Irish traditional music with Micheál Ó Súilleabháin and Tomás Ó Canainn, then we had English lecturers who were experts on Renaissance and medieval music — and it started for me there.

“I would never give up my first love which was Irish traditional singing, but medieval music attracted me. There was something about it that I felt at home with.”

“Early medieval singing has a huge emphasis on poetry like Irish traditional music does. And if you think of how you fill the space of silence with sound; we’re used to music where there’s a luxury of sound, and in medieval times it’s down to the bare bones of the melody.

"It’s that appreciation, coming from the Irish tradition, which originally is a solo tradition, every nuance of your melody and how the melody and the words flow together. It’s like a meditation.”

White Raven, formed in Switzerland in 2001, allowed Kathleen to marry both influences.

“I put this idea together of merging the two big musical loves of my life — the Irish tradition and the sounds I’d gathered from medieval music — to have a close harmony group.”

White Raven play four Irish concerts, starting with Thursday’s CIT launch and bringing Kathleen back to her own doorstep this Friday at Baile Mhúirne’s Ionad Cultúrtha, where she is also a speaker at Irish language gathering Imbolc on Saturday.

www.whiteraven.info