When Grá agus Bás premieres tomorrow, Iarla Ó Lionáird and Donnacha Dennehy believe they will be breaking new ground, writes Siobhán Long.
At first sight, Stravinsky, Steve Reich, Seán Ó Riada and The Kronos Quartet mightn't appear to make the most obvious compadres, but in differing ways, they all bear a degree of kinship with Dublin contemporary music composer, Donnacha Dennehy.
All turned to folk or traditional music for inspiration at some point, yet each treated the source material in spectacularly different ways. Donnacha Dennehy is probably at the furthest remove from his source material, and yet he has used the talismanic sean-nós song, Aisling Gheal as a virtual springboard to explore other musical terrain, one that bears few of the recognisable patterns associated with traditional music.
"For a long time, I knew very little about sean nós," Dennehy admits, having grown up in Dublin, but with both parents from Co Kerry. "But the more I heard it, I felt drawn to it organically. It's the way the pitch slides, and the ornamentations. Somehow, it hits you."
As an avant-garde composer, and founder of the Crash Ensemble, Dennehy's interest in the human voice has been more evident in his compositions in recent years. His 2002 composition interlands is a highly idiosyncratic work for two voices, which coaxes the vocal cords into positions less imaginative composers mightn't dream of suggesting. "I have a lot of dissatisfaction with classical singing although I understand the reasons for it [ in terms of projection]. There's something about this kind of singing [ sean nós] which is so close to home, has so much resonance and has been so unexplored in art music," Dennehy maintains. "For me, it's more a question of 'why not?'".
Both Dennehy and guest vocalist Iarla Ó Lionáird are quick to insist that tomorrow's premiere Grá Agus Bás, at the Samuel Beckett Theatre is not "traditional" music. To judge it as such would scarcely do justice to the new ground they believe they're breaking in both compositional and performance terms.
Those who heard the collaborations of San Francisco's The Kronos Quartet and Clare accordionist, Tony MacMahon will be surprised at the elemental nature of what Dennehy has done. Where Kronos sought to reflect the music fairly faithfully, performing straight arrangements of Irish traditional tunes, Dennehy strays dramatically from his source. It's embedded in the DNA of the piece, but barely audible in its surface landscape, Dennehy and Ó Lionáird insist.
"This is not a traditional piece of music in any sense of the word whatsoever," Ó Lionáird declares. "What's interesting is that Donnacha is a composer using folk music as a stepping off point, an initial vector to get him into another zone."
Even the fact that sean-nós singing is an aural tradition, and Dennehy's contemporary composition is a written one posed certain challenges to the composer who, when he's not working with the Crash Ensemble, lectures in music technology and composition in Trinity College.
"Myself and Iarla have been working quite hard on this," he laughs, with quiet understatement. "I also went to the Freeman collection in Trinity to see how Irish traditional music was notated and how he described the singing. I was so taken aback by the poetry in these sean-nós songs, even something as simple as trathnónín (meaning a little evening). It's such a pity that that poetry is understood by so few." For Iarla Ó Lionáird, a key attraction to committing to immersing himself in this unknown terrain is Dennehy's unconditional openness, his comfort with risk-taking.
"I really find Donnacha's willingness to saturate his own thinking with whatever he's doing noteworthy - and curious," Ó Lionáird notes, with his customary candour. "His music is complex, with so many different shades to it. Aside from any contribution I might make, it's a fully fledged piece in itself. And what I love most of all is his ability to burnish his thoughts with many musical ideas and angles. He sharpens his tools very carefully before he goes to work. He did an enormous amount of background thinking, and analysis of the text let alone the music, before he went to work. He was thinking about this for a very long time, condensing it, and when he finally had the critical mass, he just let loose and he hasn't stopped since."
"Essentially what I'm doing is taking Iarla's voice, and deconstructing in a massive way, this song," Dennehy explains, "and going in a different direction with it. Just as when Stravinsky used folk sources in The Rite of Spring, he wouldn't have claimed that he was trying to do justice to the Russian folk tradition. I'm in that same position."
Although Dennehy is not a native Irish speaker, he has assiduously distilled the text of Aisling Gheal to a point where Ó Lionáird is left with just a handful of key words to work with. It's a task Iarla relishes, albeit with more than a touch of apprehension.
"The essential message rotates around two words: gníomh or act, and séantach or denial," Ó Lionáird explains. "It seems to me Donnacha has condensed ideas from Aisling Gheal such as love, death and denial. He's taken these words, stripped them of their narrative value, and given them a symbolic value instead, because they don't have a context anymore. He has airlifted these words from the text and replanted them without their normal scaffolding, so they have to stand on their own."
In his solo work Iarla Ó Lionáird has taken sean nós by the scruff of the neck and bequeathed it a glorious transparency. He's reached out to the listener, and demystified some of the more obscure elements of the tradition, rather than inhabiting a world that only the initiated can understand. He's a singer at home in the unknown, though. His last album, Invisible Fields was a snapshot of an artist already on speaking terms with experimentation in all its unpredictable and unboxable glory.
One of the advantages of occupying a space as an avant garde composer, is that Dennehy isn't shackled by musical convention. Surprisingly though, he has found considerable common ground with the earliest recorded traditional Irish musicians who had no truck with modish notions of prettifying the music for the listener. Ironically, much of these early recordings (which Donnacha got from fiddler Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh) thrived on a dissonance that's rarely heard in traditional music today.
"They weren't trying to fit it all into this equal tempo," Dennehy notes, "and that's what drew me to it in a way. To some extent, there has been a commercialisation of folk music where everyone's getting into a nice equal tempo so that it can be accompanied by a guitar, for example. Caoimhín gave me a crash course in the extreme amount of pitch deviation and different types of intonation and colouring used in vocal singing and string playing. That's what attracted me to begin with."
Iarla Ó Lionáird views his collaboration with Donnacha Dennehy as an opportunity to go with the music to another place, and in going there, to develop his own voice in ways which may not have occurred to him before. "At the risk of sounding silly, it's very dangerous to get bored with oneself," he suggests. "Upset or disappointed, yes, but never bored. Donnacha's work is everything to him, and being made aware of someone else's vision leaves an after image, like a very bright light. You walk away from it and you can still feel it."
The Crash Ensemble premiere Grá Agus Bás by Donnacha Dennehy with Iarla Ó Lionáird, and conductor Alan Pierson in Strange Folk at the Samuel Beckett Theatre tomorrow at 8pm. Strange Folk will also feature work by composers, Osvaldo Golijov, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and Evan Ziporyn. Tickets €18 from the Central Ticket Bureau: 01-8721122.
