Letters: Organic Music – Remembering B'Ween Kay Li

Ms Choona Day, Cork, writes: May I, through the courtesy of your columns, attempt to redress the neglect afforded to the music of Irish composer B’ween Kay Li (1902–1966). My perspective is based on a lifetime’s research as well as personal...

Ms Choona Day, Cork, writes:

May I, through the courtesy of your columns, attempt to redress the neglect afforded to the music of Irish composer B’ween Kay Li (1902–1966). My perspective is based on a lifetime’s research as well as personal experience – I am his daughter. It sometimes appears (especially in this journal) as if he never existed.

Who has heard of him now? It is as if he had never struggled to make his music heard in Ireland, his country of adoption, or in Cork, the city he loved. He was a truly dedicated composer, an innovator who retained the rich musical DNA of his distant eastern ancestry, but who quickly became aware of the Irish tradition in which he was immersed from an early age. A shy man, he adored Fleischmann and Reidy and they in turn did their utmost to encourage him, for a time protecting him from the sharpest barbs directed at his music. Charles Acton described his work as ‘barbaric’; Fanny Feehan (Irish Independent) once referred to it as ‘simply incomprehensible’; and in the programme notes for the single modest retrospective of his work (Cork Antiquarian Society, 1989) the music’s basic premise was held to be ‘intriguing but ultimately preposterous’.

B’ween Kay Li was an accomplished organist and, when our family business allowed, regularly accompanied the choir in St Finbarr’s, Cobh. Although it may have been his love for this instrument that inspired him to call his own music ‘organic’, there the relationship ends. He once lightly said to me that it was the flies in his restaurant kitchen that first gave him the idea. His Jainist religious beliefs had prevented him from swatting the tiny creatures. Instead, he gently trapped, in an upturned jamjar, what others regarded as a health hazard and immediately found himself attracted to the furious, if muted, bellowings of the insects. Jesting or not, he pointed out the affinity between their sound and the frenzy of western atonal composition. ‘All god’s creatures are trying to escape from the knocking in the skull, the claustrophobia of tradition’, he would say. This led him to experiment with the aural palette of a multitude of insects. He pointed out that his instrumentalists – as he called them – were not constrained by a ‘well-tempered scale’ and therefore exhibited a freedom of creation to which even the darlings of the avant-garde could never have aspired. He equipped himself with a primitive tape recorder and microphone (now in my possession, along with some tapes) and began to capture the astonishing tones of fly and wasp, bluebottle and butterfly. He noticed that as they competed for space and air, slowly exhausting the available oxygen, their buzzing allegro slowed down to a largo tempo. Recording at 15 rpm, and playing back at 3+3/4 rpm, my father further realised that he could reduce their sound into its component tonal units. ‘Most music,’ he once said to me, ‘is the outcome of cultural conditioning. We must Abattre les cloissons!’

His first composition was entitled Foiche (it was inspired by the Gaelic word, which, I am informed, means the buzzing of a wasp in a jar). The principals were a bumble bee and a butterfly. They were accompanied by a resounding tympani section consisting of three grasshoppers. This music was as elemental as Stravinsky. It was played once on Raidió Teilifís Dublin (as we in Cork are forced to refer to it). Listeners were mystified.

Here is where the tragedy began.

The man whom my father regarded as a close friend, the Irish composer John Reidy, then stole this idea, without attribution, in order to attack traditional ceili bands. On a subsequent radio programme Reidy cleverly suggested that those bands sounded like the buzzing of a bluebottle in a jar. This was clearly a slur on my father’s work which, though he never said so, must have hurt greatly. It can be suggested that Reidy, at a cul-de–sac in his own creative life, may have been enraged that my father had made the quantum leap over the uncertainty principle that constitutes contemporary Irish composition; he had in fact cut the musical Gordian knot. Sadly and unjustly, my father bore the brunt of the ensuing odium of traditional musicians who had been incited to their customary rage by Reidy. I mark my father’s decline from that episode and he predeceased his tormentor.

My earliest memory is hearing these sounds emanating from his kitchen and making an indelible impression on my childish imagination. I have since realised that these ‘found’ harmonies are duets, trios and quartets of so fundamental a conceit that posterity will compare them to The Rite of Spring. How sad for our musical heritage that, besides the classical clique encountering them with both incomprehension and contempt – even Fleischmann ultimately distancing himself from his friend – the RTÉ music department finally blacked my father’s music. On enquiry I have discovered that the Contemporary Music Centre preserves not a single example of his work.Sadly, since the sixties and my father’s untimely death from bee stings, his music has been cruelly and consistently ignored by all shades of the music establishment.

I regard it as the duty of a daughter to seek, hopefully with the support of your fine journal, from the Arts Council a grant to rediscover my father’s lost music; to not only replace the worn and torn performers I inherited (I suspect they may be dead, not having moved in the bottom of the jars for several decades), but to expand the ensemble to include and experiment with church music, using a quintet of praying mantises. As small homage to the timeless relevance of my father’s music, my own humble first offering is entitled Onward Christian, Jew and Muslim Soldier.

Of course, I have ensured that no endangered species were, or will be, intentionally injured in the making of this music. The performers will be organically recycled, that is to say, ultimately consumed by their surviving fellow-musicians, as Nature hath ordained. 

Published on 1 September 2006

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