Martin Hayes: You can survive most challenges if you believe in what you’re doing

Musician Martin Hayes curates the annual Masters of Tradition, taking place next week in West Cork. Picture: Joe Chapman

I grew up in the townland of Maghera near the village of Feakle, Co Clare on a relatively small farm. My father, PJ Hayes, was a fiddle player. My mother was an avid gardener and a very free-thinking and powerful woman. I was the eldest of the family and I have a younger brother, Patrick and two sisters following that, Anna-Marie and Helen.

I have this very early memory that never seems to go away of being wrapped up in the back of a horse cart with my father, going along this small, narrow road.

If I wanted to be a fiddle player playing traditional music the way I do, I was certainly born in the right place for that. My father, of course, was a fiddle player and my uncle, Paddy Canny. There were lots of family musicians so if there is such a thing as destiny and if I was destined to be a musician, I probably chose a good spot.

It’s hard to say what the greatest challenge I faced so far in life is. A real challenge earlier in my life, when I did become a professional musician, was the idea of preserving something that was almost sacred to me on some level — and having a career and not destroying that at the same time.

The way I understand traditional music is that it’s noncommercial music that has cultural value and depth and is about feeling. It’s not about just being commercially successful or anything like that. I feel like there’s an ethical responsibility to maintain the music and to do your very best to honour the soul of that tradition. At the same time, that poses challenges because from a career point of view, you’re not free to just do anything you feel like doing. You must take into consideration what that music asks of you.

In order to do the music the way I like to do it, I’ve had to cultivate a certain humility and maybe humility might be one of my best qualities.

I’ve made a conscious effort to not really focus on how I will be remembered, as something that would be important to me. We just have to do the best in the moment that we’re in. Whatever anyone thinks about us, or how we are remembered, is entirely outside of our control so I don’t worry about it. I imagine that at that point when one has departed, that hopefully, we’re in a place of deeper wisdom and silly things like how we are remembered won’t really be important.

'There’s an ethical responsibility to maintain the music and to do your very best to honour the soul.' Picture: Joe Chapman

My proudest achievement is probably that I’ve lived my life with my fiddle, and that it has managed to move me around the world and seen me through the biggest part of my life really, just living off the joy of music.

Fortunately, I don’t mind travelling. There’s sometimes the drudgery of airports and that kind of thing which can be a bit much at times, but I like seeing places, and I like going to new places and I love catching up with old friends and reconnecting with old places too.

I suppose playing the fiddle is my greatest skill. One thing I do say about music is that it cannot be expressed ever as one skill. Playing music is a combination of skills that we have, there are varieties of different abilities you need to play music. I think maybe my best ability is my ability to connect a piece of melody to my feeling or for me to connect to the feeling in a piece of melody — it’s hard to decide which is which in that sense — but that, I think is perhaps musically my best quality.

Something that troubles me now is this kind of weakness of democracy and the willingness of some people to spread outright lies and to actually feel like that non-truth is just as valid as truth, if you like what that is. I find that very distressing to watch and I find it very threatening to democracy.

There was a bit of a family history around politics, and I did make some little attempts to get into business when I was quite young so maybe if music hadn’t panned out, I would have gone down the politics road or the business road or something like that.

The life lesson I would like to pass on is to do what’s in your heart and not be afraid of that because it’s not such a clever decision, I think, to go against the feelings of your own heart and your own inclination in the choices you make in life.

Being an artist or musician, all pragmatic advice that you would receive from people is, ‘God, are you sure you really want to that? That could be a tough life’, but what is in your heart is important because there will be lots of challenges in life, but you can survive most of those challenges if you believe in what you’re doing and if what you do has meaning for you. But if it doesn’t, you can be in trouble, even if you are successful.

I probably spent a number of years, even as an early professional musician, not playing the music I wanted to play and not doing it the way I wanted to do it and hesitating for years about committing to doing that kind of life.

The greatest advice I’ve been given is to trust and to trust in the things that have meaning for you and things that speak to the deeper part of who you are.

• Martin Hayes curates the annual Masters of Tradition which takes place in Bantry, Co Cork as part of West Cork Music from August 24-28. Masters of Tradition is a five-day festival featuring a series of performances covering the full spectrum of Irish Traditional Music. www.westcorkmusic.ie.