Musings on music in a crazy world

I WAS never taught music at school. It was not on the curriculum. My sisters were sent to piano lessons, but this was not deemed necessary for the boys. Besides, money was scarce.

If ever there was a possibility that poetry could fill in what music and song never had the chance to provide, that was killed dead by the crass formalism of the English curriculum back then. There was one occasion when the Leaving Cert English teacher tested our powers of memory on Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Inability to recite a randomly selected stanza was punished by six of the best from a leather strap. Classroom violence had a different meaning in those days.

Indifference to poetry was the most common result of this misguided system of education. However, our Irish teacher was more enlightened and left us with a love of Gaelic poetry. Máirtín O Direáin was a great favourite and helped illuminate the Mayo that my father had been born into and the Dublin where he had to spend his working life.

Of course, the Beatles and the Clancy Brothers were singing away somewhere in the background to my nerdish youth, but radios were not portable and the Sony Walkman and MP3 players lay many years in the future. Anyway, my focus was on mathematics, science and French as a way of building an easier and more independent life than my parents had experienced.

Words and melody

I CAN remember precisely when I let music and poetry into my life. It was the summer of 1965. I was a second-year science student attending an International Youth Science fortnight in London. One evening a concert was held where each participating nation had to put on a ‘national’ performance. I remember the young Israelis who sang and danced ‘Hava Nagila’, to great acclaim, but have only limited recall of others, even the Irish performance.

Then a Belgian girl came on stage with her guitar, the audience hushed, and she played and sang Jacques Brel’s haunting melody ‘Le Plat Pays’ (‘The Flat Country’), an evocation of the many beauties of Brel’s native Belgium. This song came from a culture where the singer and the poet were one and where songs dealt with serious issues such as war, loss, cynicism, rejection and growing old as well as with lighter themes. However, I have come to share the view of Tom Waits when he said: “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”

Over following decades I came to enjoy most of the great French singers: Brel, Brassens, Ferré, Piaf, Sardou, Gréco and many others. In the Anglo-American world there was Ewan MacColl, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen. Back home, attractive composers and singers included Clannad, Paul Brady and Luke Kelly. A common link between them all was the combination of serious words with great music. In much Anglo-American popular music lyrics are trite and barely audible against the thumping music.

Listening to popular music has been a joy of my life. When work took me to other countries I would seek out local music and songs. When the lyrics were difficult to translate, the music often communicated directly. But my complete ignorance of music technique and performance made it difficult to explore other music cultures. I knew what I liked, but didn’t always know why.

Guitar lessons

FAST forward to 2022. A series of classes was set up by the Westport Men’s Shed to teach guitar to absolute beginners, with Westport singer/song-writer Tony Reidy as maestro. I didn’t join initially since the challenge seemed utterly impossible. But I started dropping in during the class and was amazed at how much fun was being had. I was encouraged to acquire a guitar and to start learning.

My progress has been slow since learning to play is a bit like learning four foreign languages simultaneously. First you have to learn chords, the positioning of fingers on the guitar fretboard that produces melodic sounds. Next, you have to learn how to switch from one chord to another. The ageing brain communicates sluggishly with the ageing fingers! Then you have to learn how to sing, since playing a guitar badly in silence will dramatically expose your incompetence. Finally, you have to bring it all together. And that is before you ever get near finger picking. Awesome!

A pinnacle of achievement was reached shortly before Christmas, when the Irish Hospice Foundation asked the Westport Men’s Shed to help out with a project that involved composing the words and music to a seasonal song and performing it on camera. The project was masterminded by Tony Reidy and Mike Hanrahan (formerly of Stockton’s Wing), and the result was ‘Wishing You Were Here’, available to watch on YouTube.

It was rehearsed, performed and sung by the assembled Shed membership with gusto and enjoyment and was an enriching experience for everyone. It also provided a small insight into how the songs that we love evolve and are composed. It has been said that ‘music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends’. How true.

MORE ‘Westport Mens Shed Music Video - “Wishing You Were Here”’ and the short documentary, ‘Westport Mens Shed “Wishing You Were Here” Documentary’ are both available to watch on YouTube.