Clesham and Arkins: Trad collaboration forged at UCC
Cork-based musicians Conor Arkins and Paul Clesham have launched debut album 'The Morning Thrush'. Picture: Michael Meade
Though Irish traditional music depends for its very existence on the frequent repetition of tunes, over-exposure can eventually render even the most popular melody stale. Should familiarity threaten to breed contempt, however, there’s a cure to be found on Paul Clesham and Conor Arkins’ debut album.
The key’s the key, and its transposition, far from being a minor change, can make such a major difference to the playing of a tune that it takes on a completely new hue.
“Sometimes you might not play certain tunes because they’re so common or overplayed,” says Arkins. “But when you put them in a different colour, you have your instrument tuned a different way, you change them in a different key, then it’s like a new tune because you approach them differently ornamentation-wise and it’s something fresh on the ears.”
At the heart of their album The Morning Thrush is the renewal of acquaintances with familiar tunes which, as Arkins puts it, “we kinda messed around with a little bit”.
The recording is the product of a musical collaboration which began almost a decade ago when Clare multi-instrumentalist Arkins began studying at University College Cork, though for the music undergraduate “what you’re doing outside of the classroom is the main thing”, he says. “That’s where I was learning most.”
Mayo native Clesham had arrived at UCC in 2011 and was already playing music with Arkins’ sister Eimear. Before long the partnership that would lead to the recording of The Morning Thrush was established, cemented when the duo shared a house on Glasheen Rd which became a hotbed of student music sessions.
“We had a great time and we’re still having a great time,” adds fellow multi-instrumentalist Clesham. “We just love playing together, to be honest.”
Musical education, formal and informal, is central to the lives of Clesham and Arkins, studying respectively for a PhD and a research masters on the fiddle music of Clare’s Bobby Casey.
Clesham, having completed a BMus and MA in ethnomusicology, is focusing his PhD research on cross-cultural collaborations between Irish traditional and classical musicians, while lecturing at UCC and teaching in Cork Comhaltas branches.
He admits he was “very very lucky” in his own early education, when he began learning the tin whistle in senior infants. “We had a great headmaster,” he says. “He used to bring us out for 15 minutes every single day for music, whatever instrument you played. He also had an instrument bank, so I started on the button accordion in second class and ended up getting lessons from Bernie Geraghty and did grúpaí ceoil with her, and started learning the fiddle then.
“There was a lot of music around the South Mayo-Galway region, and I got lots of opportunities in secondary school, loved musicals, choirs, then went on to learn the concertina, and in the meantime did classical piano. It was always trad that was dominant,” he says, “But I loved classical piano as well, and still do.”
Arkins, raised in Ruan on the edge of the Burren, steeped in Clare’s céilí-band tradition, is a secondary-school teacher who last year became the first director of Cork College of Further Education and Training’s new traditional Irish music course. Tutoring adults in performance, ethnomusicology, and concert management, his students enjoy their work experience at weekly sessions at An Spailpín Fánach and the course, he says, is “an absolute joy to teach”.
It was at sessions at venues including the Rock Bar and the Spailpín that the tunes on The Morning Thrush were honed.
“It’s called The Morning Thrush after the tune by James Ennis, father of [piper and music collector] Séamus. We became a bit renowned for playing it,” says Arkins. “We’d always start into it at sessions and it became a bit of a joke that it was our tune so when we were thinking of a name for the album, people were joking, saying we should call it The Morning Thrush and we said ‘No, we actually are, we’re serious’.”
The tunes include military two-steps learned from Gary Shannon, hornpipes from the playing of Junior Crehan, and a Bobby Gardiner jig. There’s a strong Cork imprint, with Martin Power tunes, a John Dwyer jig, plus two sets of polkas, among them Dick Tobin’s.
“We didn’t play polkas,” says Arkins. “I’m from Clare and he’s from Mayo, but we both started to play polkas when we came to Cork.”
What’s not included on this album of lively concertina and fiddle duets, with guitar accompaniment from Jim Murray and Ryan Molloy on piano, is the near-obligatory slow piece. “On every album now you’d have a couple of slow pieces, a couple of solos on a duet album, but we were like ‘No, no solos, all 12 tracks just ‘at it’,” adds Clesham.
- Clesham and Arkins, all-Ireland champions with the Piper’s Cross and Taobh na Mara céilí bands respectively, feature during RTÉ 1’s Fleadh Cheoil series (Fridays 8.30pm) and celebrate the release of The Morning Thrush at Ennis festival Consairtín on April 4.
