Mel Mercier: The former UCC/UL academic on his gamelan project and life in 'retirement'
Mel Mercier. Picture: Michael Mac Sweeney/Provision
To call Mel Mercier a man of many talents is something of an understatement. The Dublin native began his musical journey as a bodhrán and bones player, following in the footsteps of his father Peadar, who played with The Chieftains. He went on to study music at UCC, eventually heading up the UCC School of Music and Theatre before taking over from his great friend and mentor, the late Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, as chair of performing arts at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick.
In tandem with his career as an academic and teacher to generations of Irish musicians, across classical, traditional and contemporary genres, Mercier has built an impressive CV as a composer, particularly in theatre. He was nominated for a Tony award in 2012 for his sound design on the Broadway production of Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary and more recently collaborated with Gare St Lazare on their acclaimed Beckett trilogy, How It Is.
Mercier left academia last year to pursue composing and performing full-time; Guiding Bells, a concert celebrating his 30 years of creative and educational leadership at UCC and UL, takes place at the Everyman Palace on Friday. At its centre will be the Irish Gamelan Orchestra, which showcases one of Mercier’s great passions, the Javanese assembly of instruments he introduced to Ireland in 1994.
“I’ve been able to keep one foot in the university and one foot in the professional world of theatre and of music-making but for many years, there has been a part of me that has wanted to put both feet into the world of artistic practice and to find out what kind of artist I might be,” says Mercier.
And while it would be understandable to treat Guiding Bells as a valedictory lap of honour, Mercier is very much looking forward rather than back, seeing the concert as a “cadence” rather than a coda. “It also serves as a transition into the next stage, whatever that might be,” he says.
Mercier lives near Cappoquin, Co Waterford, with his Cork-born wife Maura O’Keeffe, a well-known theatre producer, and their teenage daughter. He waxes lyrical about the beauty of west Waterford but is happy that Cork is only down the road.
“My heart is still in Cork, very much so,” he says. Mercier started in UCC as a mature student in 1986 — musically and professionally, Cork felt like coming home. “When I walked in the door of the music department on the Western Road in Cork, I never looked back, it was a very significant moment for me.”
Another momentous occasion was the delivery of the first full Javanese gamelan to Cork in 1994, a milestone in Mercier’s love affair with the Indonesian orchestral instruments. He went to Java himself to see the instruments being made.
“From afar, we might think of it as a kind of traditional music, but actually, it’s the classical music of Indonesia. The gamelan itself is made up of between 50 or 60 different instruments — large, hanging gongs of various sizes, made from bronze, a set of xylophone-type instruments, many other gong-like instruments and also a two-stringed fiddle and a small bamboo flute. The instruments are forged in an open fire, it’s an extraordinary sight.”
Every set of instruments is unique. “There’s no gamelan anywhere that sounds exactly like another gamelan. It's not like the tuning of a grand piano where the note you play on the grand piano in the Department of Music in UCC is going to sound the same as the Steinway in the Carnegie Hall. Two gamelans, even ones in neighbouring villages, will sound different. The Javanese say that they have different personalities and they give them names.”
The group of Indonesian musicians who blessed the gamelan destined for UCC named it Nyai Sekar Madu Sari, which translates as Venerable Flower of Honey Essence. “They also said it was a female gamelan, as the lead musician said a famous Javanese female singer came into his mind when he heard it,” says Mercier.
It was fitting that the UCC gamelan was delivered to the Good Shepherd Convent in Sunday’s Well, where part of the music department was located, given the instruments’ spiritual associations.
“We unloaded it and laid the instruments out on the floor of the deconsecrated church. And then we just stood back in awe. I still remember feeling that the instrument had a strong sense of energy. In Indonesia, the gamelan is considered to have a spirit life. So it does actually have an aura so when you approach it, you always take your shoes off, for example, you never step over the instruments, you always step around them.”
Mercier thrives on collaboration across all fields, academic and otherwise, as is evidenced by the guest performers taking part in Guiding Bells, from singer Iarla Ó Lionáird to dancer Colin Dunne.
“When you collaborate with people, whether it’s in music or in theatre, what ends up being made is always better than what I could do myself. In my teaching over the years, I have always been interested in bringing students together to play and I love being in that space myself, sitting on the floor with the gamelan orchestra. But it's also very exciting to to bring other artists into that space. The sound world of the gamelan is very ‘other’ to people, it's quite an encounter. The beautiful thing about the gamelan is that it's incredibly generous and very welcoming.”
As we chat on Zoom, I notice hanging on the wall behind Mercier a selection of posters featuring The Chieftains. His late father Peadar, who was born in Cork, was a key member of the legendary trad group in the 1960s and '70s, and Ireland’s first professional bodhrán and bones player.
“My father died in September 1991 — I was at home for that summer having done one year of my master's degree at the California Institute of the Arts, where I had actually sat in to play Javanese gamelan for the first time. He knew I was out in the world, broadening my horizons. He never got to hear the gamelan and sometimes I really wish he did. I can’t imagine what he might have made of it.”
Mercier did get to share a formative musical experience with his father, however, touring and performing with him and a group of other traditional musicians — Liam O’Flynn, Paddy Glackin, Joe Heaney and Seamus Tansey — in a production of the John Cage composition, Roaratorio, based on Finnegans Wake, in collaboration with the renowned Merce Cunningham dance company.
“We effectively took a deep dive into the avant garde — it turned my musical world on its head. John basically said to each of the musicians, ‘this is an hour-long piece, here’s a stopwatch, divide it up, play whatever you like, just don’t play together'.”
The experience has guided his approach to creating and performing ever since. “Here we were coming from a tradition where it was all about playing together and tuning into each other. The idea was to tune out and also not to tune in with the dancers, because that was a terrible temptation. So myself and my father, we were kind of out there. But I think that gave me a certain kind of self-confidence and a belief that there are no rules. I’ve brought that with me ever since.”
- Guiding Bells: Mel Mercier, Irish Gamelan Orchestra and Special Guests, presented in association with Cork City Council, UCC and Sounds from a Safe Harbour, at the Everyman, Cork, Fri, 6 Oct, 8pm; everymancork.com
