On Saturday night, I found myself standing outside the Church of St James in Dingle, chatting to Other Voices wrangler Philip King. The band Pillow Queens had just finished, and the crew was busy preparing the church’s stage for the next set, a live performance from a young man, David Balfe, who creates under the name For Those I Love.
Other Voices has, remarkably, thrived during 2020. As an audience, we should be grateful for the funding it received. For a festival so deeply rooted in “being there”, the team’s experience with filming live music, being nomadic and streaming concerts here in Dingle in normal circumstances in December into pubs around the town, stood to them in ways no one could have anticipated.
Earlier this year, their Courage series, which created some of the standout Irish music moments of 2020, include Denise Chaila’s star-making performance at the National Gallery, and Fontaines DC playing their now Grammy-nominated album, A Hero’s Death, in Kilmainham Gaol. And so to Dingle, streaming a festival online with no audience present, with most of the town’s storied pubs closed, and even the bar in Benners Hotel – usually a sort of festival HQ – shut.
In the Irish music scene, Other Voices is a highly unusual thing. It clearly doesn’t exist for people to make loads of money – the tickets to the church are given away free via a lottery – it lures musicians and fans down to the edge of Ireland in winter, and it is constantly changing. In some ways, it is a process, unfolding and forming simultaneously.
Cage and silence
Outside the church, I said to King that 2020 was a bit of a John Cage year. Even in 1928, at the age of 16, Cage was gravitating towards what would be one of the through-lines of his life’s work - silence - in a teenage speech he gave, saying, “One of the greatest blessings that the United States could receive in the near future would be to have her industries halted, her business discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created . . . We should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think.”
People have leaned hard on music to cope. The sense of loss among musicians unable to perform to people in a room is profound
I think about Cage a lot, this year more than any other. The changes in the sound of entire cities, and the noticing of that. The altered ambient noise, and the volume lowered. The distance between people. The forced separation. The space between, and how it’s within that where relationship occurs and exists.
“I knew him, you know,” King said of Cage, and began to detail a performance of the Roaratorio – Cage’s response to Finnegans Wake – filmed for the 1987 television series tracing the influence of Irish music on American music, Bringing It All Back Home, the title of which re-emerged this year as the theme of this very unusual Dingle edition of Other Voices.
In 2020, people have leaned hard on music to cope. The sense of loss among musicians unable to perform to people in a room is profound. Yet many musicians have both borne and communicated the responsibility of a weight we ask them to carry. Between songs on stage there are messages of reassurance. “Hope is in the post,” Damien Dempsey said, and it’s hard not to feel comforted.
Art vs marketing
In this country, we are witnessing both the emergence and arrival of an incredible generation of musicians. The level many are at, across a huge array of genres, is thrilling. Thankfully, Other Voices has been here to document that. Eras aren’t a competition, but I do feel that there has never been a more exciting time for music in Ireland than right here, right now. A lot of this music is being written about and made in opposition to the forces that attempt to make it very difficult for people to live as artists in this country. Many artists are now surviving on State supports, but that tension between the State and those who create within it, should remain. Artists are not a marketing exercise.
Yet this has also been a year where artists and those working in the creative sector had to make an economic and business case for their existence and their work. Many never imagined asking the State for support, particularly those in the live performance sector.
It is thrilling to think of the pent-up energy that will explode once we can return to the rooms and fields that armies of people build to hold the weight of our own personal release. The narrative around “saving the arts” has rightly focussed on artists and other workers, but we’ve heard less about the importance of saving audiences, what the potency of crowds gives us, how we go to things not just to see who’s on stage, but to be with each other, to recognise within each other our love for creativity, expression, hedonism.
The penance for believing in yourself and pursuing a creative life is writ large in the low earnings of most artists. But this is not the real “value”, merely proof of society’s disordered economics, priorities and perhaps more deeply, a fear of what’s in the mirror artists hold up to society. When we talk about “saving the arts”, what we’re really talking about is saving ourselves, from mundanity, from ugliness, from boredom, from a life without subtext. Because without artists, a very different silence takes hold.