When Martin Hayes was putting The Common Ground Ensemble together, a couple of years ago, the east Clare fiddle player “made very rudimentary arrangements – ideas about harmonies and chords and the rhythms and patterns” that would start a creative conversation with his fellow musicians.
Now, he says, like Chinese whispers, “echoes of those first conversations” have been working their way into the arrangements that the National Symphony Orchestra will play at three sold-out concerts this St Patrick’s weekend, when he and the ensemble join it at the National Concert Hall to perform a reimagined version of Peggy’s Dream, the acclaimed album that they released in 2023.
The result, which is being conducted by Gavin Maloney, “will be very interesting for me to hear”, says Hayes, “even though I have no capacity to arrange for orchestra, and I would never try to do so”.
Hayes’s recording debut, with Randal Bays in 1993, hinted at a musician of imagination, but it was The Lonesome Touch, his extraordinary first album with the guitarist Dennis Cahill, three years later, that made people sit up. The pair stripped back traditional Irish tunes to their bare bones, revealing an extraordinary emotional depth and melodic richness.
Hayes has been following a richly imaginative path ever since – primarily in Cahill’s company until the untimely death of the Irish-American musician, in 2022. Hayes is as at home at a session in Feakle as he is on the stage of the National Concert Hall, a venue where he has found purchase for his collaborations with Cahill, with his own Martin Hayes Quartet, with The Gloaming and now, in a sidelong way, with The Common Ground Ensemble and the NSO.
At the heart of them all is a profound belief that the music Hayes grew up with is part of a universal language – and is one that travels far better than he might have imagined when he first took up a fiddle, in the 1960s.
“Over the years I have come to regard traditional Irish music firstly as music and secondarily as Irish and traditional. That might seem like a trivial distinction to some, but for me it is a way of viewing this music as a universal expression without boundaries, freely interacting with other musical genres.”
But as well as being a musician bursting with ideas, Hayes, like his music, is reflective, questioning, thoughtful and never shy of interrogating it thoroughly.
“It’s very subtle but completely loaded,” he says, laughing. “The idea of it being music first and traditional music second is an old idea for me, but it was an important one because it’s asking for a different kind of musical integrity, one that speaks to the music, not so much the culture.
“It speaks to the melody itself and the beauty in the melody, if one is capable of discerning that, and then your integrity is a musically aligned integrity. Integrity to the tradition is a slightly different idea: ‘I’m going to play this the way it has always been played;’ ‘I’m going to play this the way my father taught me play it, and I’m going to hold on to these stylistic elements.’
“A big part of me is quite connected to that, but I don’t feel completely constrained by it. I mean, I play in an east Clare kind of way – but not absolutely. I suppose I respond to the idea that music is this universal human communication, and I want to get to the beauty and energy of the melody, and the expression, and I want to share that with whomever is on stage with me, and I want to share that directly with the audience as well.
“I’m not a big thinker in avant-garde music. I’m not out to change the world of music or to break new frontiers. I don’t even think about that – but I do love the idea that the real heart and soul of a piece of music can come to life in many different ways and through many different circumstances and opportunities.”
Hayes belongs to a cadre of extraordinary communicators who can reveal unexpected insights about our shared humanity by peeling back the layers of a tune. If the melody is the backbone of Hayes’s relationship with music, then it seems that this collaboration with the National Symphony Orchestra feeds his desire to explore the harmonic potential of those melodies. “Traditional Irish music is a treasury of melody, and the symphony orchestra is the apotheosis of harmony,” as he puts it.
“The melody is the central thing one has in traditional music. It’s the commonality we have,” he says. “People play rhythmically and phrase in different ways in different parts of the country, so there are any number of ways in which the melody can appear, but at the end of the day there is actually a line of melody and it’s one central truth.
“One of the great strengths of traditional Irish music over the years has been many great musicians’ capacity to interpret these melodies, whether it’s Willie Clancy or Tony MacMahon or Tommy Potts or whoever. They just get the deepest and greatest amount of feeling from a piece of melody.
“So that’s one of the skills that I think I have on one level: the ability to bring a melody to life. I would say The Gloaming and working with Dennis Cahill were two great opportunities for me to explore that, and I’m still exploring it.”
Hayes was unmoored by Cahill’s death; Peggy’s Dream is dedicated to his memory, as well as to that of his mother.
“My mother has been in my own musical life also as a supporter, as a discerning listener and somebody who was a good sounding post,” says Hayes. “Most of the projects I would do, she would come and hear them. One of the last things she asked me was, ‘So what are you doing next?’ And at that point I didn’t know I would be doing this or that the album would be called Peggy’s Dream.
“It’s named after a tune in the Canon Goodman collection, and it was sent to me by Steve Cooney. He was quite friendly with my mother as well, and he said, ‘I think you should be playing this.’”
Three members of The Common Ground Ensemble – the cellist Kate Ellis, the guitarist Kyle Sanna and the pianist Cormac McCarthy – are contributing arrangements to this concert series; Hayes will anchor the group’s exploration of the tunes along with the concertina player (and fellow Common Ground member) Brian Donnellan.
Hayes regards the composer Shaun Davey as the ultimate musical explorer. “It’s interesting what I’m going to do now,” he says, “but there’s no way that it breaks the ground that happened with The Brendan Voyage. You can’t break the ground twice. It was wonderful the first time we heard pipes in an orchestral setting. It was so amazing.”
[ Shaun Davey: ‘I got to know where the sweet spot is on the uilleann pipes’Opens in new window ]
Hayes is quick to self-deprecate: he says he feels himself to be “underskilled” and “a bit of an antique” when he hears musicians who can play classical and traditional music with ease, such as the fiddle players and composers Zoë Conway and Aoife Ní Bhriain.
“I come to the table with whatever little bit I managed to bring off the side of the mountain,” he says. “I hope I can communicate and work something out – and also hope that there’ll be a compassionate response all around to my inabilities to function in an orchestra, for example. But, when I was a teenager, the idea of what I’m doing now” – with the NSO – “was unimaginable.”
Martin Hayes & The Common Ground Ensemble perform three sold-out concerts with the NSO at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Friday, March 14th, Saturday, March 15th, and Tuesday, March 18th
