Notes Against Sameness

A reply to David Power's review of Mary MacNamara's The Blackberry Blossom CD in the last issue of JMI.

The review of Mary MacNamara’s latest release, The Blackberry Blossom (2000), by David Power in Vol. 1, No. 3 of the JMI (March/April), perpetrates an astonishing range of follies. To get the matter of simple opinion out of the way first: the review is basically unfavourable to MacNamara’s playing on this new CD and there is, prima facie, nothing wrong with this — a reviewer should never baulk at having to give a work under review the thumbs down, as it were. The crux of this particular review lies more in its faulty method of argument, its skewed and fundamentally misleading process of evaluation.

Power’s launching negative point relates to the title tune: ‘… I was unimpressed with the careless attention to the melody of “The Blackberry Blossom”, a thoroughbred tune in its native state. Analysis of this particular rendition revealed some flaws. For example, there was a tendency to repeatedly play two same-note quavers instead of moving on to the next note at the essential first beat of the bar …’ Where to start? Firstly, there is no such thing as the ‘native state’ of a traditional Irish tune. The only location a tune might notionally be said to be in its native state is in one of the renowned traditional music collections — in O’Neill, say, or in Breathnach — but anyone with a real interest in traditional Irish music knows that even these respected scripted versions are only rough templates for the playing of the tunes themselves.

Our store of jigs, reels, hornpipes, etc., is essentially an oral legacy and by their very nature, therefore, these tunes are fluid. Rich variation on individual pieces is ensured by a range of factors: time period, local style, instrumentation and so on. To scold a musician for playing certain notes ‘instead of moving on to the next note’, to call one particular rendition of a tune ‘flawed’, is to set up a false notion that there is some kind of authoritative version of a popular reel like ‘The Blackberry Blossom’. One wonders what Power might say of the highly idiosyncratic and highly enjoyable Galway version of this same reel on, say, Johnny O’Halloran’s But Why, Johnny (1999).

The next remonstration Power offers is against MacNamara’s tendency to overuse the ‘triple tap’ at the expense of ‘rolling’ and other kinds of ornamentation: ‘There was a ubiquitous shortage of ascending and descending triplets, and rare was the use of appoggiatura, or “cuts”.’ Now, it must be said that traditional Irish music is as open to technical analysis as every other kind of music; this type of sub-Ó Riada condescension, however, does nobody much good. To suggest that traditional musicians must, at all times, defer to the possible range of ornament is akin to saying that Micho Russell, or Mrs Crotty herself, would both have been better traditional musicians if they’d only committed themselves to a bit more ornamentation — when the very point of their playing was that they pared the music down to its unadorned melodic elementals.

Not satisfied with generalisation, Power then proceeds with what is presumably intended as a technical coup de grâce: ‘ … the first one and a half bars of the hornpipe “The Golden Eagle” should be as follows: BA,GbDGBDGB,DGBD … What we get from Mary MacNamara each time she plays the sequence, however, is: BA,GgDGBDGB,DGBD. The pattern is thereby fundamentally altered with, in my opinion, detrimental consequences to the tune the composer intended us to hear.’ At this point, the traditional music aficionado will be up in arms at such plain mistakenness. Following on my earlier points, it is clear that there is no ‘should’ attached to the playing of an oral music. Just where Power gets his ‘should’ is not clear — as far as I can ascertain, the precise originator of ‘The Golden Eagle’ is not known (as with the overwhelming majority of Irish tunes) and Power himself does not identify his ‘composer’.

Thus, a crucial question should be asked: what allows Power to assume he knows what such a composer might have ‘intended’? He even repeats the point:

‘ … what most of us do in Irish music is carefully choose the good tunes and we follow them the way the composer intended’. In glaring fact, we have no way of knowing (even if we really wanted to know) what the composers of our traditional tunes and airs intended. Even when the devisers of newer tunes are known — a host of tunes by Galway’s Paddy Fahy and Cavan’s Ed Reavy for instance, are played in today’s music sessions — any dictate on rigid adherence to the melody is unthinkable on the behalf of the devisers since it would run contrary to the spirit of the oral tradition in which they compose.

Finally, Power takes the tempo of MacNamara’s music to task: ‘The pace of this presentation in my opinion is too slow generally. Never are the tunes attacked heartily and never do you get a sense of a licentious let-rip’. Such an implicit dismissal of the importance of regional style (and one of the more noted markers of the East Clare style MacNamara plays in is the draíocht or lonesomeness it achieves through expressive steadiness) is a capitulation to the horrendous cliché that all Irish traditional music should be wild and unbridled. And this is the damaging thrust of Power’s review overall: it affiliates with the ridiculous homogenising sweep that would have all musicians at all times on all instruments in all parts of the country play uniformly. To quote the standard, though vital, point Fintan Vallely makes in his Companion to Irish Traditional Music (1999): ‘ … regional styles may also be “songlines” in the sense that their differences, their interfaces and their overlaps chart a great weft and warp of history, change, variety, ingenuity and possibility within the music genre’ [my italics].

In conclusion, and to re-emphasise, any reviewer is entitled to their personal taste and, thusly, Power is warranted in certain preferences. However, this applies only when predispositions are declared — he admits, for instance, to having a ‘personal dislike’ for piano accompaniment. To enter into this spirit, let me suggest that Mary MacNamara’s music is brilliantly soulful; the listener has to be prepared to enter dream-time with her playing, and what she does with such tunes as ‘The Stone in the Field’ and ‘The Hundred Pipers’ is sublime. It should, nevertheless, also be suggested that The Blackberry Blossom is not quite of the calibre of MacNamara’s first recording, Traditional Music from East Clare (1994). The first context for assessment of any artist’s work should be their own previous output; a further worry that Power is far from solid ground is raised by the fact that his review gives that first CD — one of the best of the nineties — not a single mention.

Published on 1 July 2001

John Kenny teaches in the English Department, NUI Galway and has an active interest in Irish traditional music.

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