B-Side the Leeside: Connie O'Connell - Bóithrín na Smaointe
Connie O'Connell.
“Composing tunes is one thing, but without a listening audience and a community of musicians to ‘adopt’ the tunes, the practice of composing is pointless,” admits Connie O’Connell.
Therein lies a dilemma faced by composers of music in the Irish traditional idiom: To be considered ‘traditional’, a tune must become embedded into the repertoire of other musicians, yet any attempt to ease it into the consciousness of peers by introducing a self-composed piece at a session risks breaking social taboos - the trad equivalent of blowing one’s own trumpet.
By what process of osmosis then, can new tunes enter the canon of traditional music? Cork fiddle player O’Connell’s 2014 collection, Bóithrín na Smaointe, provided a digital solution to a traditional problem.
Though his 69 compositions were released as two CDs, together with a book of descriptive notes and staff notation, they were also made available as a free, online learning resource by UCC, where O’Connell has been a music lecturer for four decades.
The CDs and books have long sold out but the resource remains online, with sound files to aid those learning the tunes.
As a means of ensuring the exposure and longevity of compositions, it can trump a commercial album, believes O’Connell, whose only previous solo CD, Ceol Cill na Martra released in 2000 by Shanachie Records, is no longer available.
“CDs are only a flash in the pan and they’re played for a short bit. You buy it and you play it and you might like it or you mightn’t like it. You put it into a box and it might never be played again,” he says.
Releasing self-composed material on CD can also be a risky business for the traditional musician, he adds.
“When I made the CD for Shanachie Records I had a lot more tunes composed but I made a point of putting in only three or four of them because newly-composed is a very strange thing - it mightn’t take off at all; it could be a disaster.”
Though Ceol Cill na Martra received a good response, he was reluctant to release further albums.
“Different people were putting pressure on to do another one but I decided I wasn’t going to record any more,” he says. “At the time, every Tom, Dick, and Harry was recording CDs. I didn’t intend to go down that road, to throw another one out on the market.
“I had a few tunes that were after going very well and people were playing them, so I said it would be a good thing to put out a book of the tunes, or after writing the bloody things they would go for nothing. They’d never see daylight only for doing something like this.”
He is pragmatic about the time it can take for tunes to enter the tradition, but having recorded ‘Bóithrín na Smaointe’ with his daughter Áine, whom he taught as a child to play the fiddle, he has at a minimum ensured his work will be available to his grandchildren and their generation of musicians.
“I’d say ’tis after I’ll be passing on that they’ll probably get more popular. It’ll make no difference to me, but they’ll be there for the likes of Áine and the kids and away down the line.”
The 69 tunes were recorded at the Kerry home of his long-time musical collaborator Eibhlín de Paor in three full days of “hard old going”, John Blake providing piano accompaniment.
The decision to commit the tunes to CD and online archive also served a practical purpose, given a compositional process that occurs whenever and wherever a melody arises.
“I could be working outside in a field and if I got the first bar or two bars I’d be dideling or whistling to myself and I’d say ‘that’s a good start to a tune’. I’d memorise it and I’d come in and catch the fiddle,” says O’Connell.
“I had an awful lot of tunes collected and they were on pieces of paper, on tapes, and all over the place, so I said that the book would be a good idea.” The tunes in the collection go back as far as ‘The Torn Jacket’, one of O’Connell’s most well-known compositions, inspired in 1985 by a singer of his acquaintance – and a case of fake news.
“There was an Oireachtas in Cork, in Morrison’s Island,” he recalls. “Deaglán Tallon sang a newly-composed song and won the prize [money] and he drove a most awful spree.
“I met him again the following night and I said ‘God Deaglán, you were fairly steamed last night’. I said, ‘do you know that you tore my coat?’ and he believed it and was all apologies about it, then I told him that it didn’t happen at all.
“He turned around and said to me ‘Connie, that would be a great name for a tune, the torn jacket’ and I composed the tune.”
Several other compositions honour friends and family; more are inspired by the landscape and nature of his native Cill na Martra. The tunes, though, have travelled far from home, being performed and recorded by musicians in Ireland, France, Germany, and America. “They’ve made it to the all-Ireland [Fleadh] and the Gradam Ceoil, and I’ve walked into sessions where I’ve heard them played,” says O’Connell.
The latter may be seen as a mark of distinction above all others, even where it fails to equate to recognition for the composer. “It takes a long time before they fade into the tradition and people just know ‘The Torn Jacket’ and don’t know where it came from,” he adds.
To enter a pub and “just naturally or organically there are people playing your compositions informally [is] a real mark that the tunes have entered the communal canon,” agrees Irish Traditional Music Archive director, fiddle player Liam O’Connor, who wrote the introductory notes for ‘Bóithrín na Smaointe’.
He believes O’Connell’s approach to digitalising his compositions was “innovative in its time”, and overcomes some of the social barriers to invigorating the tradition with new tunes.
“If you go to your local session and play a composition of your own, if you throw it spontaneously into a selection of tunes, obviously no one else in that company is going to know that tune,” he says. “If they like it, they’ll say ‘what’s that?’ and to say ‘oh that’s one I composed myself’ isn’t kosher in the social ethics of an informal session.” Instead, a new tune must be smuggled “secretly and anonymously into that stream and if it takes off, it takes off, but it’s not generally associated with the composer”.
There is, he says a “disconnect in the social values within traditional music”.
“A solo composer, particularly someone who’s humble like Connie, has very few formats or mediums to share their music. There are composers that might have 100 compositions that people would love to play, but the social ethics of sharing the repertoire in a session don’t allow for that. So UCC deserve great credit for bringing Connie’s work to the public and letting people learn them.
“I think we’re in a new reality now, that if someone composes a tune and if a certain body of traditional practitioners embrace it and play it and it lives and evolves like all the rest of the canon of works, then it’s handed down - maybe with the help of technology - but it’s handed down.”
- See: http://epu.ucc.ie/connieoconnell/
- Connie O’Connell will receive an award for dedication to Sliabh Luachra music at a ‘Sliabh Luachra Composers Concert’ on October 24 during the Patrick O’Keeffe Traditional Music Festival in Castleisland, Co Kerry. The concert also features Sliabh Notes, Fuinneamh, Jackie Daly, Paul de Grae, Edel Fox, Neill Byrne, Nickie McAuliffe, and Simon Crehan, recipient of the festival’s inaugural young musician award. See: http://patrickokeeffefestival.com/
