Mary O'Malleychallenged musical apartheid and her own discomfort to spend a year in the world of classical music, and bridged the divide between low and high art.
I have just spent a year with classical music. As writer-in-association with Music for Galway, I attended concerts regularly for the first time since I arrived in Lisbon at the end of the 1970s, so young and star-struck that lunchtime concerts in the cool gardens of a hot city seemed like a gift from heaven. This was the carnation revolution, music for the masses and opera for everyone, for less than the price of a pint or a glass of vinho verde. Twenty years back in Ireland and I have attended only a dozen such events.
Outside of Dublin, the notion of high and low culture in music, and the gulf dividing them, is hard to avoid. This is not surprising when most parents cannot afford music lessons for their children and secondary schools do not consider music appreciation part of the core curriculum.
Even in primary schools, where the record is better, much of the success is down to individual teachers. Small wonder then that classical audiences are largely conservative, middle class and over 50, at least in Galway.
I have always been at home with traditional music, in all its glorious hint and allegation. I know many tunes such as The Cualainn, which are classical in shape and spare in their finer performance. I understand that creativity in the tradition is in the performance as much as the composition. I have heard those tunes countless times. I can distinguish the Clare style from Sliabh Luachra, Sligo jigs and reels from the bolder, looser Kerry dances. I don't play myself. I only listen, but I know enough to sketch the borders of my ignorance.
I spend time in the company of the musicians, enjoy their irreverence, their deadly wit. I hold them in high esteem, but know better than to hint, much less say this. I've endured the tours and eavesdropped on their conversations and they, in return, give poets some respect. The music came from my place and my people. I have permission to hear it live without what Seamus Heaney calls "cultural anxiety".
Not so this other world, so bound around with fears and misconceptions.
The nuns marched us into recitals in the parlour a few times a year in an attempt to civilise what one sister called "a class of ignorant Connemarianms". She had her work cut out for her and succeeded in teaching us that classical music was like cod liver oil - it was administered a few times a year and it was good for you.
Despite working with the National Chamber Choir a couple of times, and a wonderful period in Lisbon at the end of the 1970s when I attended opera rehearsals at Sao Carlos, the national opera theatre, where the chief tenor was gynaecologist to many of the women in the company and to me, and where a friend played in the orchestra, I remain essentially uncomfortable with my lack of familiarity with the great canon of classical music, particularly in live performance.
Classical. How cold and grand the word sounds. I do not know how to talk about this music. I am not inculcated into its mysteries. Its vocabulary is mysterious to me but I love the words and the polished instruments.
The performers have a dress code. Will the audience have secret signs, like people at auctions? Is this music to be suffered or endured, and if enjoyed, then how? The halls are cold and the hip stay away. The people who come are ancient mostly. I might be dead of boredom or pneumonia by Christmas.
That is what I found myself thinking last September.
These perceptions disturb me. They point to a failure of democracy, a failure in teaching. The result is a sort of musical apartheid, sad and unnecessary. The popularity of Lyric FM proves that the listeners are there.
I am going to see for myself which perceptions are real, which imagined.
I'll find out what the average audience looks like, sounds like, how it behaves, at least in Galway. I have nothing to compare the playing with, so I know little of interpretation.
I have only one Fauré's Requiem, one Mass for St Anthony of Padua, and one recording of the Bach suites for cello, although I suspect that in this case one is enough - it is the recording by the first classical musician whose name I knew, the famous Catalan cellist Pablo or Pau Casals. Lesson number one, I think, for teachers: compare and contrast.
WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO the excitement of those first concerts 20 years before in a city newly freed from fascism, determined that everyone would read and write, everyone would have the chance to see the best plays, hear the best music? Listening skills gained in one genre of music transfer to another as they do in language, and what is music but another language - the most eloquent of all, perhaps. That was nine months and many concerts ago. So how did I listen and what did I hear?
They started with Mozart, played by Finghin Collins.
Mozart is almost too big for ordinary mortals. You could drown in his great orchestral swells. He is like Shakespeare, capable of every sleight of hand, and, like Shakespeare, able to produce some fairly awful passages. Three piano concertos were easy enough for me to manage; a bit like concentrating on a soliloquy.
In my mind's eye I see this brilliant mischievous boy, his musical world full of delight, tumbling in among the odd cascade like a marvellous fool. Perhaps this is the effect of listening to the piano live, in NUI Galway's Aula Maxima, a cold hall with yellow walls, but what stays with me from the performance is the playfulness and demonic energy of the best theatre.
In the second concert, the young Italian Albert Nose would perform pieces by Schumann, Prokofiev and Ravel's La Valse. From the first moments of the Schumann Arabesque the air shifted, the audience slowly began to settle into a single entity that would move towards what Coleridge referred to as "negative capability" at the end of the third section. This is what great performers can do, whether in theatre or music or dance.
From the first note, it was obvious this Italian had music in him.
I didn't know then about Prokofiev's explosion of "intemperate" brilliance towards the end of the first World War, nor that this opera was written towards the end of his life when he was back living in Russia.
The walls of the Aula Maxima faded and all the glorious movement of the avant-garde, the marvellous wave of artistic expression that rolled across Europe entered, poignant because it would so soon end in silence. The music shook and thrilled.
By the time Romeo and Juliet goose-stepped across the room, the lyrical and the barbarous were fused and balanced in a dance that conjured Nijinsky's ghost and seemed to prefigure the lines of the poet Paul Celan from Death Fugue: "A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes/He writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete/Your ashen hair Shulamith we are digging a grave in the sky . . . ' When it ended, the audience seemed stunned.
One woman in the audience seemed to have been elsewhere. "Well," she remarked to her friend, "that was too loud. I wouldn't let him near my piano." Galway has many such lonely pianos, while the town's youngsters move along the river and the canals, with songs to sing but without an instrument to play. I will be back next year knowing at least this: it is not just that our children deserve music, but music, if it is to thrive, deserves our children. The cold austerity of the Aula Maxima could use a little youthful irreverence, even if they clap in the wrong place.
Galway, release your prim pianos and teach the kids to play.
