IrishMusicInfo
The Sunday Tribune Weekly Traditional Music Column by Fintan Vallely
990718
Dermot McLaughlin of the Arts Council chaired this year's Willie Clancy school discussion on 'media'. Identifying accountability he held that "Media is not an amorphous thing - we are talking about people doing a job". Pat Ahern, a columnist with The Examiner used coverage of an 1809 'Carolan Commemoration Concert' in Dublin to show that such writing has been going on for two centuries. But the gathering felt that the modern press tends to uncritically regurgitate PR, such as this newspaper's and The Examiner's specialised columns being somewhat unique among national press. Talk on the (quite different) broadcast media's presentation of music indicated varied, but continuing, coverage today with a tension between 'representation of national art' and 'entertainment'. Straddling the virtual fence separating these, Na P’obair’ Uilleann has released an album of young pipers - 'A New Dawn. Uilleann Piping, Another Generation'. This opens comparatively with the remarkable wax-cylinder recording of Loughrea/USA genius Patsy Touhey (c. 1901), but its tracks are devoted to teenagers, those born a century after him. Among them is the outstanding Mike Smith of Dublin, and, too, the 15-year-old Eliot Grasso from Baltimore, Maryland who shows the persistence of the uilleann pipes in the USA. Like the other youngsters he has benefited hugely from a modern-day mobility, piping contacts with Ireland, and from the presence on his own continent of some of the instrument's finest exponents, notably Paddy Keenan and Jerry O'Sullivan. Darragh Murphy from Newcastle, Co. Down like the others also began learning at age eight, continuing Northern association with pipes in which his influence has been Robbie Hannan. Family commitment, and schools like the Willie Clancy, have provided scope for each of these players' developments, but as with Dubliners Ciar‡n î Briain and Conor McKeon, behind them is also specialist teaching and direction by NPU. Such an approach is hugely-rewarding for multiple-facility instruments (as is shown by the successes of the harp bodies) but could also be useful to such as concertina or accordion. Of course the indigenous associations of pipes and harp give an Iconic status, an idea of greater worth which dramatically enhances prestige and so inspires. Louise Mulcahy of Abbeyfeale, Co. Limerick rounds out the NPU album's fabulously-talented 'brat-pack', like McKeon she is from an intense music family, and has achieved national awards. One of the small number of females playing pipes (notable are mentor M‡ire N’ Ghr‡da, and tutor-writer Heather Clarke) she is heir to a well-documented practice. For the recently-published Cork Piper's Club's 'A Hundred Years of Piping' book shows a young May McCarthy with step dancers c. 1910, and also one Mollie Morrissey who (thanks to the press) we hear was described in 'The Lady's Pictorial' magazine in 1905 as "the youngest and most proficient female piper in Ireland".
©Fintan Vallely, IrishMusicInfo.com
Back to Sunday Tribune, 1999 master page