IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
990606
Three years ago uilleann piper Davy Spillane posed on the cover of Apple Report, a specialist computer consumer magazine. In one hand he had a colour-screen laptop running a music programme, in the other the uilleann pipes with regulator keys prominently displayed. Technologies separated by two centuries, both portable and global, potentials mutually challenging. Davy Spillane has for more than a decade been associated with electronically enhanced music - a founder of Moving Hearts with Christy Moore and Donal Lunny in the 1980s, his too was the wailing colour to Riverdance in the early 1990s. No less profound was his association with Andy Irvine and composer Bill Whelan in East Wind, and his albums The Storm (1985), Shadow Hunter (1990), Pipedreams (1991) and Place Among the Stones (1996) testify to a commitment to exploration of the ethereal and ephemeral in traditional airs. Best known among these is his swan song May Morning Dew, now again on his latest recording, teased out of yet more kaleidoscopic display. Yet for all this, and in seeming contradiction to his patronage by Sony Music which has given him and the uilleann pipes a world stage, inside the promotional cybershell there is a piper clamouring for critical attention from peers he considers to have disingenously written him off. Perhaps this is not surprising, for the uilleann pipes carries considerable historical baggage. A hundred years ago it had already replaced the harp as the iconic voice of the ancestors, and by the 1930s might have slipped to oblivion but for the single-mindedness of, in particular, Dublin maker Leo Rowsome, eventually re-harnessed as a thoroughbred by visionary Breand‡n Breathnach. The energy of this process makes it impossible to view the instrument without agenda. Forty-year-old Spillane now looks over his shoulder at schooldays in Col‡iste Eoin at Dun Laoghaire that made tin whistle compulsory and led him to piping, the frantic energy of his Grafton St. busking days and pub sessions: "young sexual energy drove us", he says, "It could have been anything else - even heroin". Then Joe Comerford's film Traveller exposed him as a player, cementing a misleading image of a Travelling People background. Now he intends to come back: "I've done the 'contemporary music' business at the expense of omitting the Traditional, something which I basically am at the end of the day". Perhaps so his latest Sea of Dreams is his testimonial, but can the wiring harness really ever be hung up? Dreams and Sea conjure up the summer schools: the Willie Clancy at Miltown Malbay from July 4th (£60 adult, all in teaching and event fee), Tubbercurry from July 11th (£45), Drumshanbo from July 18th (£35), and for the institutionally-funded there is Blas at Limerick (£400, or £741 with live-in, full board). Continuing today and tomorrow are the Ennistymon singing festival, and Sligo, Derry, Limerick, Westmeath, Cavan and Laois fleadhnna.
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
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